Aaj ki tithi — today’s tithi, with both its ends

And then, still today

• Krishna Dashami

  Krishna paksha · waning Moon

  04:37 pm to 01:59 pm8 Aug

Two tithis touching one day is the normal case, not an error. If you are fixing a vrat or a shraddha, what matters is which tithi is running at the hour the observance calls for: sunrise for most fasts, moonrise or midday for others.

A tithi is the time the Moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the Sun. Thirty of them make one lunar month. The Moon does not travel evenly, and it runs faster when it is closer to the Earth, so a tithi is not a fixed length: it can be as short as about nineteen hours or as long as about twenty-six.

A civil day is exactly twenty-four hours. Two intervals of different lengths cannot stay in step, so the moment a tithi ends drifts a little every day, and it lands wherever it lands, 04:10 one week and 15:40 the next. Nothing has gone wrong when the tithi turns over during your lunch.

The other half of the answer is that a panchang day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. The hours after midnight but before dawn still belong to yesterday’s vara. That is why the tithi “of” a date is conventionally the one in force at sunrise, and why this page names the city its sunrise came from.

The tithi in force at sunrise in Delhi, and when it hands over. Each row is a separate computation for that day.

A lunar month is split into two pakshas of fifteen tithis each. Shukla paksha is the bright half, from the new Moon to the full Moon, when the Moon is growing. Krishna paksha is the dark half, from full back to new, when it is shrinking. Both count from one to fifteen, which is why a tithi is always named with its paksha: Saptami on its own is two different days a month apart.

Fourteen of the names repeat in both halves: Pratipada, Dwitiya, Tritiya, and so on through Chaturdashi. Only the fifteenth is distinct: it is Purnima at the end of the bright half and Amavasya at the end of the dark. Almost every fast and festival in the Hindu calendar is fixed to one of these thirty and not to a date, which is why Diwali, Holi and every Ekadashi land on a different date each year while staying on exactly the same tithi.

• Aaj ka choghadiyaEight good and bad hours
• Rahu Kaal todayThe window to hold off on
• Full panchangAll five limbs, 40 cities

Worth being straight about: the instant a tithi ends is the same everywhere in India, because it is one position of the Moon and not a local event, so the clock times shift between cities only by the few minutes their zones differ, which for India is none at all. What genuinely changes with the city is sunrise, and therefore which tithi is the one “of” the day. These pages carry that, with the rest of the panchang.

• Agra
• Ahmedabad
• Amritsar
• Bengaluru
• Bhopal
• Bhubaneswar
• Chandigarh
• Chennai
• Coimbatore
• Dehradun
• Delhi
• Guwahati
• Haridwar
• Hyderabad
• Indore
• Jaipur
• Jammu
• Jodhpur
• Kanpur
• Kochi
• Kolkata
• Lucknow
• Ludhiana
• Madurai
• Mumbai
• Nagpur
• Patna
• Prayagraj
• Pune
• Raipur
• Ranchi
• Srinagar
• Surat
• Thiruvananthapuram
• Tirupati
• Udaipur
• Ujjain
• Varanasi
• Vijayawada
• Visakhapatnam

How this page is worked out

• The tithi boundaries come from our own calculation engine, as the instants the Moon’s elongation from the Sun crosses each multiple of twelve degrees.
• They are sidereal, with the Lahiri ayanamsa, the Indian civil standard. That is the reason two panchangs sometimes disagree by a minute.
• Sunrise, which decides which tithi belongs to the day, is computed for Delhi’s own coordinates.
• All times are Indian Standard Time.