Birth panchang and chart: tithi, nakshatra, name letter

Enter the date, time and city of birth above. The tithi running at the moment of birth is the birth tithi, such as “Bhadrapada Krishna Dashami”. The month is given both Purnimanta (North India) and Amanta (Maharashtra, Gujarat, the South); in Krishna paksha the two differ by one month.

The birth nakshatra is the one the Moon is in at the moment of birth; each of the 27 spans 13°20′ and has four padas of 3°20′. Enter the date, time and city of birth above to get the nakshatra, its pada and when it ended. The Moon crosses about one nakshatra a day, so the more exact the time of birth, the better.

Each nakshatra has four padas, and tradition gives each pada a syllable, such as O, Va, Vi, Vu for Rohini. The syllable of the pada the Moon is in at birth is taken for the start of the name. The full table is below.

The lagna is the rashi rising on the eastern horizon of the birthplace at the moment of birth. As the Earth turns, each rashi rises for a while: by our calculation, in Delhi from about 1 hour 25 minutes (Meena) to 2 hours 20 minutes (Karka). So the lagna needs both the exact time and the place of birth. Enter them above for the lagna, the birth chart and the house of each graha.

Dividing each rashi into nine parts of 3°20′ gives the navamshas. In the navamsha (D9) chart each graha is written in the rashi of the navamsha it is in. In the Parashari tradition the count starts from the rashi itself for the movable rashis (Mesha, Karka, Tula, Makara), from the ninth for the fixed ones (Vrishabha, Simha, Vrishchika, Kumbha) and from the fifth for the dual ones (Mithuna, Kanya, Dhanu, Meena). The navamsha lagna changes about every 13 minutes, so it depends even more on the time of birth.

Enter the date and city and choose “time not known”; the calculation then uses 12 noon. The tithi and rashi often hold all day, but the nakshatra pada, and sometimes the nakshatra or tithi, can change during the day. The result says so when that happens.

In the panchang a day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise. A birth after midnight but before sunrise therefore belongs to the previous day’s vaar: a birth at 4 am on a Friday is on Thursday night in the panchang. The result says so separately.

Twelve lunar months are about 11 days shorter than the solar year, so the same month and tithi moves about in the Gregorian calendar. The day on which the birth tithi holds at sunrise is taken; if it holds at no sunrise (a kshaya tithi), the day it begins. In a year with an Adhik month, the regular (Nija) month is taken.

No. It gives the panchang of the time of birth and the lagna and navamsha charts, the positions of the grahas at that moment, worked out astronomically. It has no predictions, doshas, dashas or remedies. For a reading of the chart, show this PDF to your own purohit or astrologer.

The grahas’ positions agree with Drik Panchang within 1′. Differences usually come from three things: the ayanamsha (we use Lahiri; some programs use Raman or Krishnamurti), mean or true Rahu and Ketu (we use mean, as Drik does), and the lagna: Drik Panchang’s lagna comes out about 11 to 18′ further on than ours, the same as about 50 seconds of birth time. So for a birth within a minute or two of a change of lagna the lagna rashi can differ; the result then gives a warning.