Panchang — the five limbs of the day

The five limbs

Pañcāṅga means 'five limbs'. Tithi is the lunar day — each 12° the Moon gains on the Sun, thirty to a lunation, fifteen bright and fifteen dark. Vāra is the weekday, ruled in turn by the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn. Nakṣatra is the 13°20′ arc of the ecliptic the Moon occupies. Yoga is the sum of the Sun's and Moon's longitudes, again in 13°20′ arcs, twenty-seven of them. Karaṇa is half a tithi, eleven in rotation.

All five are arithmetic on two longitudes. SIA computes the Sun and Moon for any moment and place from its own Sūryasiddhānta model and derives the limbs from them — the same computation that gives the birth pañcāṅga inside a kundli gives the day's pañcāṅga in the Panchang tab.

The birth pañcāṅga

Your birth tithi, vāra, nakṣatra, yoga and karaṇa are part of the free chart view. The birth nakṣatra is the one the Vimśottarī daśā is counted from, and the one the melāpaka reads gaṇa, yoni and nāḍī off; the tithi and vāra enter the muhūrta arithmetic.

One honest seam

In SIA the vāra changes at 05:30 IST rather than at local sunrise — a deliberate, stated simplification of the classical sunrise-to-sunrise day. Every other limb follows the exact longitudes.

Questions

Related

• Muhurta (Muhūrta)Electing the moment: the nine tārās and the marriage windows.
• Janam KundliThe birth chart — what it holds, how SIA computes it, what is free.
• The twenty-seven nakṣatrasTwenty-seven nakṣatras — lords, pādas, gaṇa, yoni, nāḍī.