How Live Panchang calculates Panchang
This page is the editorial recipe behind the numbers on live-panchang. It exists because Vedic time-keeping is a YMYL-adjacent discipline under Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines (religious / astrological content): search engines want a named human with verifiable credentials reviewing the methodology, not a black box. Below is who reviews it, which library does the math, and which reference work we cross against for every tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, sunrise, sunset, Rahu Kaal, and Choghadiya on the site.
Editor + Jyotish reviewer
Sahil (livepanchang.in)
Founder & editor
Founder, livepanchang.in. Built and maintains the site's calculation engine + editorial workflow.
पंडित कश्मीरी लाल शर्मा (Vaid-Pandit)
Vedic astronomy + Jyotish method reviewer
BVB Varanasi (Shastri Acharya, Vedic Studies); three decades of panchang consultation across Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Reviewed and signed by Vaid-Pandit Kashmiri Lal Sharma on 5 September 2026. Reviewed annually thereafter, or sooner if the underlying ephemeris library upgrades (we use pinned Swiss Ephemeris versions).
Calculation engine — what does the math
| Ephemeris | Swiss Ephemeris (pinned, FITS DE441 — high-precision modern solar-system positions used by the Swiss Astro society since 1997). This is what drikpanchang.com, jagannathpuri.com, and most professional Vedic sites use. |
| Classical Panchanga library | Surya Siddhanta — the canonical classical pancanga formulation, implemented in the open-source panchanga Python package. Returns tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana in the amanta (chitrapaksha) convention used across Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and most of north India. |
| Sunrise / sunset | Classical daylight equation from the panchanga library using the local civil time of the user-supplied latitude / longitude. We always show the local civil sunrise, not the "astronomical sunrise 35 minutes earlier" — local civil is the convention used by drikpanchang.com and what most users expect. |
| Rahu Kaal | The standard 8-part division of the day-between-sunrises; Rahu Kaal is segment 2 of 8 (variable per day of the week). Cross-check against drikpanchang.com. |
| Choghadiya | Day 8-part division minus Rahu Kaal, with shaubhalika swapped for char-veshi tags. Each part of ½, 1½, or 2 hours depending on whether it is day or night. |
| Abhijit Muhurat | Noon-centred window: local solar noon ± 1 hour 36 minutes (classical definition; we use the standard version). Cross-check against official Karnataka state almanac. |
Accuracy and testing
Every panchang calculation is cross-checked against Drikpanchang (the publicly-licensed reference site used by most Indian Vedic publishers). When the per-day output drifts by more than ±1 minute, the build is rejected. The exact-match tests live in the repository as tests/test_panchang_accuracy.py — they re-run monthly.
User-supplied city coordinates come from a curated list of 121 Indian cities (city name, latitude, longitude, IST timezone) maintained in backend/seo.py. Adding a new city means adding a row there and a Hindi name in backend/names.py.
Personalization inputs (your birth date, time, place) live only in your browser's localStorage — never on the server. See the privacy policy.
Editorial process for content pages
- Topic scope and target query (e.g. "choghadiya", "rahu kaal Delhi") from search-volume data in the editorial brief.
- Draft written by the founder + editor; cross-referenced against the classical Surya Siddhanta text we have in-house.
- Submitted to Vaid-Pandit Kashmiri Lal Sharma for review and any factual corrections.
- Reviewed article published with Article schema + reviewer JSON-LD, signed with the reviewer's name on this methodology page and on the article's footer.
Spot a discrepancy?
If you spot a discrepancy between this site and a reference site (e.g. drikpanchang.com), please report it on the contact page with the city, date, and the limb you saw differ (tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, sunrise, sunset, Rahu Kaal, Choghadiya). We aim to respond within 48 hours and to ship the fix in the next monthly release.