☼ Free Panchanga Calculator — the Five Limbs of the Day You Were Born

Umbriel's free Panchanga calculator gives the five limbs of your birth day — vara, tithi, karana, yoga and nakshatra, plus the hora you were born in — each with how much of it was still running at the moment you arrived. ⚠️ This is the panchanga of a birth, not today's almanac. Free, no account.

• What you'll needBirth date, time and place
• What you getVara, tithi, karana, yoga, nakshatra and hora for your birth moment, with the percentage of each still to run and the deity or lord traditionally attached to it
• CostFree — no account required

Panchanga means five limbs. A Vedic day is measured five ways at once, and a Jyotishi reads all five before saying anything about it. Umbriel computes them for the moment of a birth rather than for today, which is the less common use and the more personal one.

The vara is the weekday and its ruling graha. ⚠️ The Vedic day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight, so a birth at four in the morning belongs to the day before by this reckoning — about a quarter of all births. Umbriel reads the vara off a sunrise-corrected day ruler rather than off the calendar date, and says so on the card when it applies, because a Thursday against a Friday birth certificate otherwise looks like a fault.

The tithi is the lunar day: the Moon's distance ahead of the Sun, divided into thirty steps of 12° each, fifteen in the waxing Shukla paksha and fifteen in the waning Krishna. Because it is a difference between two bodies, the ayanamsa cancels out and the tithi reads the same in a tropical chart as in a sidereal one. The karana is half a tithi, and the seven movable karanas carry the seven weekday planets in order.

The yoga is the Sun and Moon added rather than subtracted, divided into twenty-seven — so unlike the tithi it does not cancel the ayanamsa, it doubles it. A yoga computed from tropical longitudes lands three or four nakshatras away while looking like a perfectly ordinary yoga with a perfectly ordinary lord. Umbriel computes it sidereally throughout.

The hora is the planetary hour, taken as one twelfth of the daylight and one twelfth of the night rather than as sixty clock minutes — so an hour is long in summer and short in winter, and the ruler follows the Chaldean order from the day's own lord.

Each of the five is still running when you are born, so Umbriel prints how much of it was left rather than only its name. A tithi 40% remaining and a tithi 2% remaining are different moments inside the same lunar day.

Vara, tithi, karana, yoga and hora are all arithmetic on the sidereal Sun, Moon and sunrise the chart already produces, which is why nothing here can drift. ⚠️ The sign of the operation decides whether the ayanamsa matters. Tithi and karana come from the Moon MINUS the Sun, so the ayanamsa cancels and they read identically in either zodiac; the tithi is that elongation divided into thirty steps of 12° and the karana into sixty of 6°, with the seven movable karanas taking the seven weekday planets in order. Yoga comes from the Moon PLUS the Sun, where the ayanamsa does not cancel but DOUBLES — some 47° at this epoch — so a yoga computed tropically lands three or four nakshatras away while still looking like an ordinary yoga with an ordinary lord; Umbriel computes it sidereally, in twenty-seven divisions of 13°20′, with lords running the nine-lord cycle from Saturn. ⚠️ The vara is the one that catches software out: the Vedic day begins at SUNRISE, so a birth before dawn belongs to the previous weekday — roughly a quarter of all births — and Umbriel reads the vara back off a sunrise-corrected day ruler rather than off the calendar date, which also guarantees the weekday and the hora on the same card cannot contradict each other. The hora is unequal by construction: the daylight is divided into twelve and the night into twelve, so an hour is long in summer and short in winter, and the ruler steps through the Chaldean order from the day's own lord. Each limb is reported with the fraction of itself still to run, because all five are mid-flight at any birth.