Panchang to the Minute: Our Panchang API Checked Against Drik Panchang

A panchang is the Vedic almanac for one day: the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana, the weekday and its lord, and the times to avoid, such as Rahu Kaal. Most people read it on Drik Panchang or a phone app. We added it to the Open Ephemeris API, and before we said anything about it we checked it against Drik Panchang.

What you get

Send a date and a place. The day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, as a panchang day should. You get back:

• sunrise, sunset and the next sunrise;
• the vara (weekday) and its lord;
• every tithi (with paksha), nakshatra, yoga and karana in force during that day, each with its exact start and end. If a tithi ends at 14:35, you get that tithi and the next one, not just whichever was running at sunrise;
• the Sun's and Moon's sidereal signs at sunrise;
• Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika and Abhijit muhurta. Abhijit is empty on Wednesday, as Drik Panchang lists none.

Every time carries the place's UTC offset, and the time zone is in the response. Every name has a stable id, the usual spelling, the IAST transliteration and Devanagari, so an app can show "शुक्ल द्वादशी" or "Shukla Dwadashi" from the same answer.

How it compares with Drik Panchang

We picked four days that are hard in different ways: a tithi that changes in the middle of the day in New Delhi, New York in daylight saving time, Reykjavik in June (a 20.8-hour day with two nakshatra changes) and Tokyo in January. Our values first, Drik Panchang's in brackets. Times are local.

Case	Sunrise	Tithi end	Nakshatra end	Yoga end	Rahu Kaal
New Delhi, 2026-10-23	06:26:47 (06:27)	Dwadashi 14:36:26 (14:35)	Purva Bhadrapada 21:03:13 (21:02)	Dhruva 22:08:37 (22:08)	10:40:39-12:05:17 (10:41-12:05)
New York, 2026-07-04	05:30:15 (05:30)	Krishna Panchami 04:01:17 next day (04:00)	Shatabhisha runs past the next sunrise (Drik: "Full Night")	Priti 07:31:45 (07:32)	09:15:19-11:07:51 (09:15-11:08)
Reykjavik, 2026-06-10	03:03:54 (03:04)	Dashami 19:28:17 (19:27)	Uttara Bhadrapada 03:51:42 (03:51), Revati 02:46:36 next day (02:46)	Saubhagya 22:33:09 (22:33)	13:27:49-16:03:48 (13:28-16:04)
Tokyo, 2026-01-15	06:50:30 (06:51)	Krishna Dwadashi 23:47:01 (23:46)	Jyeshtha runs past the next sunrise (Drik: "Full Night")	Vriddhi 00:08:09 next day (00:08)	13:05:39-14:20:41 (13:06-14:21)

Every limb name is the same as Drik's. Every time is within 2 minutes; Drik prints whole minutes, so that is as close as the comparison can show.

One thing we noticed and have not explained: our tithi end times run about one minute later than Drik's in all four cities. It is consistent, so it is probably a difference of convention rather than an error, but we have not confirmed the cause. We would rather tell you than round it away.

The positions come from the NASA JPL DE440 ephemeris. Each boundary is found by stepping through the day and then narrowing to a few milliseconds, so the seconds in the table are the calculation, not padding.

Ask your assistant

If you use Open Ephemeris in ChatGPT or Claude, you do not need to write any code. Ask in your own words:

• "What is today's Panchang in Mumbai? I want the tithi, nakshatra and Rahu Kaal."
• "Give me the Panchang for 14 January 2027 in Chennai."

The assistant finds the place, calls the panchang, and answers from the computed times.

For developers

The route is POST /vedic/panchang. Send date, latitude, longitude, and optionally timezone (it is found from the coordinates if you leave it out) and ayanamsa.

curl -X POST https://api.openephemeris.com/vedic/panchang \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"date": "2026-10-23", "latitude": 28.6139, "longitude": 77.2090, "timezone": "Asia/Kolkata"}'

{/* Run against the live API 2026-10-25: 200; tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, vara and muhurta (rahu_kaal, yamaganda, gulika, abhijit) present. */}

In the MCP server, the vedic_chart tool takes panchang: true and returns the same thing.

A place where the Sun does not rise or set that day (polar day or night) gets a clear error rather than a guessed day.