CrescentThe shape of the day.
The panchang reads the day the way Vedic tradition does, by the Moon and the weekday, not just the date.
Pick a place
The panchang depends on sunrise, so it needs a location. Search for a town above to begin.
What a panchang actually is
Panchang means five limbs, and that is literally what it is: five quantities that together describe a single day in the Hindu calendar. It is an almanac rather than a horoscope. It says nothing about you and everything about the day, which is why it has to be computed for a specific place as well as a specific date.
The five limbs
Tithi is the lunar day, defined by the angular distance between the Sun and the Moon in twelve degree steps. It does not line up with a 24 hour day, so a tithi can begin mid afternoon and end the following morning. Vara is the weekday, the only one of the five that behaves the way a Western calendar does.
Nakshatrais the lunar mansion, one of 27 divisions of the Moon’s path against the stars. It is the sharpest of the five: the Moon changes nakshatra roughly once a day, and much of Vedic timing rests on which one it is in. Yoga combines the Sun and Moon positions into one of 27 named combinations, and karana is half a tithi, so there are two per lunar day.
Why place changes the answer
Every one of these is anchored to sunrise at your location, so the same calendar date produces a different panchang in Chennai than in Chicago. This is the single most common reason a panchang here disagrees with one printed elsewhere: the other one was computed for a different city, usually a default one. Crescent geocodes the place you enter and computes from that, and reports every time in the local time of that place rather than yours.
Rahu Kaal and the other inauspicious windows
Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika Kaal are periods traditionally avoided for beginning something important. They are derived by dividing the time between sunrise and sunset into eight parts and assigning them in a fixed order that depends on the weekday. Because they are built from sunrise and sunset, their length changes with the season and their timing changes with your latitude. They are not fixed clock hours, and any source that gives you the same Rahu Kaal year round is not computing them.
Reading it alongside a chart
A panchang describes the day. A birth chart describes a person. They meet when you are choosing timing for something, which is where the transitsview is more useful, since that compares today’s sky against your own chart. The glossary covers nakshatra, dasha and the sidereal zodiac these calculations rely on.