Panchang today
Rahu kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika kaal, Abhijit muhurta, the sixteen choghadiyas and the twenty-four horas for your city, divided from your own sunrise rather than a pretend 6am to 6pm day. No birth details, nothing saved.
Why these times move
Every period on this page is a fraction of the real daylight at your location. Rahu kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika kaal are each one eighth of the stretch between sunrise and sunset, and which eighth depends on the weekday. That makes them longer in summer than in winter, and different in Kolkata from Mumbai on the same date, because sunrise is about an hour apart across that distance.
This is the part most sites get wrong. Dividing a fixed 6am to 6pm window is simpler and gives a tidy 90 minutes every day, and at the solstices it lands more than an hour away from a printed panchang. In Delhi in late June, a Sunday Rahu kaal that really runs from 17:37 shows up as 16:30. The daylight here comes from the JPL DE440 ephemeris with the standard refraction correction, the same source everything else on this site is computed from.
This page does not need your birth time
Which makes it the odd one out here, and it is worth being plain about. The day's parts are the same for everyone standing in the same city: they come from a sunrise and a weekday, not from a chart. Nothing on this page is personal, so nothing is asked for and nothing is stored.
Anything read against your chart is a different question. Your kundli places the grahas at your own birth moment, and your dasha timeline is the classical answer to timing over years rather than hours. Both need a birth time you can trust, which is what rectification is for.
What is and is not claimed here
The times are computed and we will stand behind them. What each period is traditionally held to be good or bad for is reported as convention, which is what it is: Rahu kaal is avoided for new beginnings, Abhijit is held to be broadly favourable, Amrit and Shubh are sought and Kaal and Rog avoided. No verdict is offered about your day, because the tradition does not contain one and inventing it would be the kind of overstatement this site does not make.
Some of the weekday tables behind this page are transcribed rather than derived, and are noted as wanting a check against a printed panchang. Dur muhurta and Varjyam are absent for the same reason: the tables they need have real regional variation and are not something to guess at.
The day's parts, answered
What is Rahu kaal?
Rahu kaal is one eighth of the daylight, and which eighth it is depends on the weekday. It is the stretch traditionally avoided for starting anything new: signing, travelling, opening a business, beginning a journey. It is not held to affect work already under way.
Why is Rahu kaal a different length on different days?
Because it is an eighth of the actual daylight, not a fixed 90 minutes. Delhi's longest June day runs 13 hours 55 minutes, so its eighths are about 104 minutes; a short December day gives about 75. Anything that shows you a fixed hour and a half is dividing a pretend 6am to 6pm day, and at the solstice that lands more than an hour away from a printed panchang.
Is Rahu kaal the same everywhere in India?
No. It is built from your local sunrise and sunset, and sunrise in Kolkata runs about an hour ahead of Mumbai on the same date, closer to two hours across the whole country. Pick the city you are actually in rather than a national figure.
What is choghadiya?
Choghadiya splits the daylight into eight and the night into eight, and labels each part after a graha: Amrit, Shubh and Labh are the sought ones, Kaal, Rog and Udveg the avoided ones, and Char is held fit for travel. It is the everyday form of muhurta, the one consulted before leaving the house, because it labels the whole day rather than naming one window.
What is Abhijit muhurta?
Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen muhurtas of the daylight, the one straddling local noon, and it is the conventional answer to when something can be started today. It is a fifteenth of the actual daylight, so it runs about 56 minutes at a Delhi midsummer and about 41 in December. The 48 minutes you often see quoted is the equinox figure, which is the same fixed-day assumption the rest of this page exists to correct. The usual convention drops it on Wednesday, so this page shows nothing there rather than inventing a window.
What is a hora?
A hora is a twelfth of the daylight or of the night, each ruled by a graha, and the first hora of any day belongs to that weekday's own graha. This is where the names of the days of the week come from: count 24 horas on from Sunday's first and you land on the Moon, which is Monday. The same cycle in the same rotation shows up in Latin, Sanskrit and English.
Do the day's parts depend on my birth time?
No, and this is the one page here that does not ask for one. Rahu kaal, choghadiya and hora are facts about a date and a place, identical for everyone standing in the same city. Your birth chart is a separate question, and rectification is what settles that one.
Which tithi and nakshatra does the page show?
The ones holding at sunrise, which is the convention printed panchangs use: the tithi of the day is the one in force when the day begins, even where it ends mid-morning. The table also gives the times each one starts and ends, so you can see where a limb turns over during the day.