Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
Five limbs describe the day as a whole; four more windows cut it into parts. Every one of them is worked out from your own sunrise and sunset.
Today's Panchang answers what kind of day this is — the tithi, the nakshatra, the yoga, the karana and the weekday, with sunrise and sunset. The other pages each answer a narrower question about one stretch of that same day: which part to avoid, or which parts are favourable. If you are not sure which you want, the almanac is the one that shows everything at once.
Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika Kaal, Chaughadiya and the five limbs all come from a single panchang computation for your date and place. That is why the timings agree across these pages rather than drifting, and why changing the city changes every one of them at once.
The word is pancha-anga, five limbs, and the five are Tithi, Vara, Nakshatra, Yoga and Karana. Each is a position rather than an opinion: the tithi is how far the Moon has moved ahead of the Sun, the nakshatra is the segment of sky the Moon is passing through, the vara is the weekday, and yoga and karana are derived from the first two. An almanac states where the Sun and Moon are for your date and place, and the five limbs are how that position is named.
Two things sit side by side on this page and they are not the same kind of statement. The positions and the timings are arithmetic — where the Moon is, when a tithi ends, when the sun rose — and two correct sources will agree on them to the minute. Which of those periods is auspicious is the tradition's reading of them, held for a long time and by many people, but still a reading. An almanac describes a day. It does not predict what will happen in it, and nothing here should be taken as saying otherwise.
Four ways, and the first is the common one. A day is read as wholly good or wholly bad, when the whole point of the windows is that a day is cut into parts — an inauspicious hour sits inside an ordinary day. A single limb is read alone, when the five are meant to be read together. Timings are taken from another city, when every one of them is computed from your own sunrise. And a favourable window is read as a promise rather than a convention for choosing between hours that are otherwise equal.