29 December 2025 Panchang

What aaj ka panchang tells you

Panchang means five limbs — pancha anga — and the page above is built on exactly those five. Tithi is the lunar day: every twelve degrees the Moon gains on the Sun completes one, so a lunar month holds thirty, fifteen in the bright half (Shukla Paksha) and fifteen in the dark half (Krishna Paksha). Vaara is the weekday, counted from one sunrise to the next rather than from midnight. Nakshatra is the lunar mansion the Moon occupies, one of twenty-seven equal arcs of 13°20′. Yoga is formed from the sum of the Sun's and the Moon's longitudes, again in twenty-seven parts. Karana is half a tithi; eleven karanas cycle through the month, four of them fixed and seven repeating.

Read together, the five limbs describe the quality of the day in the traditional calendar. That is why a festival, a fast or a family ceremony is fixed by tithi and nakshatra rather than by a date on the Gregorian calendar.

Aaj ka nakshatra — today's nakshatra — is the one the Moon is passing through right now. The page names it with its pada, the quarter of the nakshatra the Moon has reached, and the time the Moon moves on to the next one — a single day often spans two nakshatras, just as it can span two tithis — and links to the guide for that nakshatra.

Reading aaj ki tithi — the tithi today

A tithi does not follow the clock. Because the Moon's speed varies, one tithi can run for anything from about nineteen to twenty-six hours, and it can begin at any time of day or night. The convention for most observances is the udaya tithi — the tithi in force at local sunrise — which is why the page shows both the current tithi and the moment it ends.

Two consequences follow. When a short tithi begins and ends between two sunrises it never touches a sunrise and is called kshaya, a skipped tithi. When a long tithi spans two sunrises it is counted on both days, an adhika or vriddhi tithi. Observances tied to a particular tithi — Ekadashi, Purnima, Amavasya, Chaturthi — therefore occasionally fall on the day before or after the one a fixed-cycle calendar would suggest.

The Hindu calendar behind the page

The lunar month is named two ways. In the amanta system, used across much of South and West India, a month runs from one new moon to the next. In the purnimanta system, common in North India, it runs from one full moon to the next, so the dark half of a month carries the next month's name. The page shows both. It also gives the Vikram Samvat and Shaka Samvat year numbers, the samvatsara name from the sixty-year cycle, the ritu (one of six seasons) and the ayana — whether the Sun is in its northward or southward course.

The date picker reaches any day from 1900 to 2100, so the same five limbs can be read for any date in the Hindu calendar 2026 — the day of a festival, a fast, a birthday or a planned ceremony — and for the years either side of it.

Why the panchang changes with your city

Every timing on this page is anchored to sunrise and sunset at the city you choose. Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika Kalam are fixed fractions of the local daylight; the choghadiya periods divide the local day and night into eight parts each; Abhijit Muhurat sits on local solar noon. A panchang for Delhi and one for Chennai on the same date will therefore show different times, while the instant a tithi or nakshatra ends is the same moment everywhere, only expressed in local time.

These are classical calendar computations offered for reference. For a specific window, the dedicated Choghadiya, Rahu Kaal, Shubh Muhurat and Abhijit Muhurat pages explain each timing in more depth.