Muhurtha, explained

Your first minute

There is no sign-up. On a fresh install a short welcome tour walks through the few choices that change what Today says — your language, your place, Choghadiya or Gowri, the festivals you keep and reminders. Every page can be skipped, and you can run it again from Settings → Show the welcome tour.

1. 1
   Allow location, or pick a city

   Every number in a Panchang depends on your sunrise, so the app needs to know where you are. Allow location once, or tap the city pill under the date and choose one by hand — search works offline against a bundled list, and reaches Apple's geocoder (on Android, the phone's own geocoder) only if you look for somewhere it doesn't carry.

2. 2
   Read the first two cards

   Anything notable about today comes first — a fast, a festival, an eclipse. Then Plan your day tells you, in one sentence, when the next good window opens and which hours to leave alone.

3. 3
   Tap anything you don't recognise

   Every term in the app opens a short explainer: what it is, what tradition says it's for, and what people do and avoid. That is the whole point of the app.

4. 4
   Pick your traditions

   Tap the gear on Today → Which festivals to show. A hundred and thirty-eight festivals is a lot if half of them aren't yours. Turn on the regions you actually keep.

Cheat sheet

If you remember only these, you can use the app.

The four tabs

Reading the day

The heading gives you the weekday, the date and the year, and under it the Hindu month, the paksha and the Vikram Samvat year — so Bhadrapada · Shukla Paksha · Vikram 2083 means the bright half of Bhadrapada.

When the day crosses from one tithi into the next, the line just below the date names both: the one running now is bright and the other is dimmed, so you can see at a glance which tithi is current and which one is still to come.

Below that, the cards appear only when they apply, most important first:

Plan your day

This is the card most people open the app for. It answers one question — is now a good time to start something? — and it answers it relative to the current moment.

The first line names the window you are in, or the next one and how long until it opens. The second line is Rahu Kaal: on now, coming up in so long, or already over. Below them sit the day's windows as chips you can read at a glance.

The green windows

The red ones

Choghadiya or Gowri

Two tables name the good and bad hours of a day. Choghadiya is read across North and West India; the Gowri Panchangam is the daily tool in Tamil Nadu and much of the South. Both cut daytime into eight parts, but they name the parts differently, so the same hour can be good in one and bad in the other.

Rather than show both and leave you to decide, Muhurtha uses the one your family follows for the good windows in Plan your day and for the "now" line on the card. The other table, and the Hora, are still there: open the card and switch between Choghadiya, Gowri and Hora.

1. 1
   Open Settings

   Tap the gear on Today.

2. 2
   Pick under "Good and bad hours"

   In What you see, choose Choghadiya or Gowri Panchangam. Today changes straight away.

When Rahu Kaal wins

Good and bad windows are worked out separately, so they sometimes land on top of each other. The most common case is Wednesday: Abhijit sits at midday, and Wednesday's Rahu Kaal is the fifth eighth of the day, which also sits at midday.

Muhurtha treats the red window as overriding. When that happens you will see:

The Abhijit chip stays on the card but goes grey, its hours are struck through, and it carries a line saying which window overrode it. Rahu Kaal takes the highlight instead. The headline will never offer you an eclipsed window as the day's best.

Auspicious Choghadiya and Amrit Kaal are handled the same way, except that they are dropped from the card entirely rather than shown struck through — one Labh window is much like another, so a dead one is only clutter, whereas Abhijit's silent absence at midday would look like a bug.

The five limbs

Panchang literally means five limbs. Scroll down on Today and you'll find all five with their start and end times. Every one of them is tappable.

Favourable yogas

These are combinations of weekday and nakshatra that tradition treats as lucky in their own right. They are the usual reason to check a Panchang on an ordinary Tuesday rather than only around festivals.

Sarvartha Siddhi — "accomplishing every purpose" — is the broadest. Guru Pushya is Pushya nakshatra landing on a Thursday, and is the day people buy gold. Amrit Siddhi is rarer and is double-edged in some traditions, which the app notes rather than hiding.

The card shows which are running, when they start and end, and a line on what each one is.

Changing the place or the date

A different day

The arrows either side of the title step a day at a time. Tap the year beside the date to jump to any date at all. "Today" returns you to the present.

A different place

Tap the city pill. You can use your current location, pick from cities you've saved, or search. The bundled list covers India, the diaspora and the wider Hindu world and works with no network; anything else is geocoded by Apple on your device if you're online. On Android, "Use my location" asks the phone's own geocoder to name the place, and falls back to the nearest bundled city when offline.

A year at a time

The Festivals tab lists everything notable in a year, grouped by month. Tap any entry to read about it or jump to that day on Today. The year picker sits in the middle of the toolbar; the list opens at the current month rather than at January.

The filter button on the right chooses which categories appear:

It also switches the grouping between Gregorian months and Hindu months, which is worth trying once: seeing Bhadrapada as a block, rather than split across August and September, is how the calendar actually thinks.

The floating search button finds anything by name across whatever years you've browsed.

Choosing your traditions

Muhurtha carries 138 festivals. Most households keep perhaps twenty. Settings → Which festivals to show lets you turn regions on and off:

Tap the count beside a tradition to see exactly which festivals it would add before you commit — no guessing from the name. There's also a switch for minor observances, if you want the well-known days only.

When two days disagree

Some years a festival genuinely falls on two different days depending on where you are and which rule your community follows. Diwali is the classic case: it wants Amavasya at twilight, and some years the tithi straddles the boundary.

Rather than silently picking one, Muhurtha flags the day and explains the alternative — which other date has a claim, and why. If your family keeps the other one, you'll at least know why the app said what it said.

Every festival's rule

Each festival is a rule — a lunar month, a fortnight, a tithi, and the moment of the day it is judged at — not a date typed into a list. The full list of rules lives on its own page, where you can switch between Amanta and Purnimanta, filter by region, search, and pick a year from 2026 to 2040 to see the date each festival lands on.

Open the festival rules →

Inside the app, the same rule sits on every festival card under The rule, and Learn → How festivals are dated lists them all.

Finding a muhurat

Tap Muhurat at the top left of the Festivals tab. Pick what you're planning and a year, and the app walks the whole year looking for days that clear the traditional shortlist.

Gold-edged days. A day whose card has a gold edge has several strong factors lined up at once: a favoured nakshatra (Rohini, Uttara Phalguni, Uttara Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada or Revati), the waxing moon, Abhijit Muhurat sitting clear of the red windows, and any favourable yoga that is running. The green chips on each card name the ones it earned, however many there are; they wrap onto further lines rather than running off the card. Gold is a way of sorting a long list, not a verdict.

What it checks

A day has to clear three lists at once — the tithi, the nakshatra and the weekday — each of them specific to the purpose. Weddings and housewarmings also respect the seasons tradition sets aside: Kharmas, when the Sun is in Sagittarius or Pisces, and Chaturmas, Vishnu's four months of sleep. Buying a car is not bound by either, so the app doesn't pretend it is.

The hours it gives you

Tap a day to open it. The app works out the stretches when a shortlisted tithi and a shortlisted nakshatra are both actually running, then cuts out Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika and Dur Muhurat, rejoins anything a tithi change had split, and discards fragments under 45 minutes. What's left is what you're shown, with the nakshatra running through each stretch.

You & family

Settings → You & family. Add a person with their date, time and place of birth, and the app reads their Panchang back to you.

Tithi birthdays

Your janma tithi is the birthday the Panchang keeps: the same tithi, in the same lunar month, coming round each year. Because the lunar year is about eleven days shorter than the solar one, it lands on a different Gregorian date almost every year — which is exactly why families forget it.

Muhurtha works out the next one and puts a card on Today when it arrives. It's computed where you are now, not where you were born, because a birthday is kept where you live.

Shraddha

Add someone as a Remembrance rather than a birthday and the app tracks their varshik shraddha — the annual tithi on which they passed — the same way.

Separately, the Festivals tab lists all sixteen days of Pitru Paksha with the tithi each one belongs to, and Today shows the kutup and aparahna windows when one falls.

Asking questions

Type a question in ordinary words, or tap one of the suggestions above the box. The assistant works the answer out from the same engine the rest of the app uses, then offers to open the day or read more. The suggestions follow the calendar: they name the festivals that are still to come, a festival drops off once it has passed, and the month shown rolls forward near the end of the month, so you never see October offered in November.

Fasts, eclipses and special days

• Breaking a fast. Ask When do I break my fast? for the parana window of the next Ekadashi or other fast, with the rule that sets it (Hari Vasara, for instance). What is Parana? still explains the word.
• Eclipses. Lunar and solar are answered separately, with the local times and when Sutak begins: nine hours before a lunar eclipse and twelve before a solar one. If an eclipse cannot be seen from where you are, or is only a faint penumbral one, the answer says there is no Sutak and names the next eclipse that carries one.
• Gand Mool and Panchak. Is today Gand Mool? lists the six nakshatras (Ashwini, Ashlesha, Magha, Jyeshtha, Mula and Revati), says whether the Moon is in one now, and gives the next such day. Panchak is answered the same way.
• Colours. Colour for Thursday gives that weekday's colour; during Navratri, colour today gives the Navratri colour instead.
• Puja hours. For a festival kept at a particular hour, such as Diwali at Pradosh or Janmashtami at midnight, the answer gives the window as well as the date.

Questions that need a birth date

Choose Find my nakshatra and rashi, Find my janma tithi, Find festivals on my birthday or Find the Shraddha date and Ask shows a small form for the date, time and place. It then gives:

• the nakshatra, pada, Moon sign, Sun sign and naming syllable, using the same rules as the birthdays under You & family. If you do not know the time and the Moon changed nakshatra that day, it says so rather than guessing;
• your janma tithi, the lunar birthday, and its next two dates;
• the festival that falls on your birthday, which needs only the date;
• a parent's Shraddha tithi, from the date of passing, with its next two dates. If the time is not known the tithi at 6 AM is used, so confirm it with your priest.

After every reply a Back to start option returns to the beginning, and so does the sparkles icon in the tab bar.

A thousand written answers

Ask also carries written answers to a thousand questions people commonly put about the Hindu calendar, festivals and rites — Why is rice forbidden on Ekadashi?, What is Gandanta?, Can women offer water on the Shivling? — and uses one when your question is close to it. These answers are fixed text and carry no dates, so they never go out of date. When an answer is about a festival, a chip such as When is Diwali? sits beneath it, and one about a recurring observance offers Next Ekadashi, Next Pradosh and so on. Tap it and the date is worked out then, for the year you are in.

In your own language

You can type a question in Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu script as well as in English or Roman letters (Diwali kab hai), and the suggestion chips work in whichever language the app is set to. Replies that are worked out from the Panchang appear in your language. The thousand written answers are in English for now.

Sharing a day or a festival

The share button beside the place name on Today sends that day as a picture: the date, the Hindu month and fortnight, the tithi and nakshatra, the green and red windows, and any festival with the rule that fixes it. In the Festivals tab, opening a festival offers Share this festival, with the rule and the start of its story. The picture is drawn on your phone when you tap share and is sized for WhatsApp and stories. Nothing is uploaded.

The Learn tab

Reading material, and nothing else. Start with How to read today — the sixty-second version — then browse:

Every festival also has a story in its own sheet: what it commemorates, and how it is kept.

Prayers & aartis

The aartis, chalisas and mantras people actually reach for on a festival morning, with their meanings beside them. Today also surfaces the relevant one on the day it's wanted — Ganesh's aarti on Ganesh Chaturthi, without you going looking.

Reminders

All off until you allow notifications, and then each one is separate:

Festival, Purnima/Amavasya and Navratri alerts follow the traditions and month system you chose. They're scheduled a fortnight ahead by your own device and refreshed whenever you open the app or return to it. There are no push notifications, so there's no server sending you anything.

Widgets & countdown

Long-press the Home Screen, tap +, and search for Muhurtha. The widgets show today's tithi and nakshatra and the next window, and update through the day.

The Live Activity is opt-in, under Settings. Turn it on and a countdown appears on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island while Rahu Kaal or Abhijit is running, then clears itself when the window closes. If iOS has Live Activities switched off for the app, Settings says so instead of failing silently.

On Android there is a home-screen widget (long-press the home screen, choose Widgets, and find Muhurtha), and the countdown is an ongoing notification. Turn on Live window in Settings and a countdown sits in the notification shade while Rahu Kaal or Abhijit is running, then clears itself when the window closes.

Calendar

Settings → Add to Apple Calendar writes a year of festivals and fasts into a calendar you choose, as all-day events. It asks for write-only access, so it cannot read anything already in your calendar — and iOS enforces that, not just the app.

On Android, Settings → Add to Calendar does the same. Android has no write-only calendar permission, so it asks for calendar access; the app uses it only to find a calendar to write to and to replace the events it added itself, and it does not read your other events.

Export as CSV or PDF

Settings → Export festival calendar builds a year of festivals for your city and month system, and gives you three ways to take it with you:

Dates are worked out for the city shown at the top of Today, so change the place first if you want someone else's calendar.

Languages

Muhurtha speaks nine languages. Everything is translated: the screens, every tithi, nakshatra and festival name, the story behind each festival, the Learn topics, the Ask answers and the widgets.

Changing it

Open Settings → Language and pick one, or leave it on Follow device to use your phone's own language. The choice belongs to the app, so an English phone can show the Panchang in Kannada, and a household can read it in the language it is discussed in. Names change with it: the same nakshatra is spelled Rohini, रोहिणी or ரோகிணி everywhere it appears.

Amanta or Purnimanta

North and south India disagree about when a lunar month ends. Amanta months end at the new moon and are used across the south and west. Purnimanta months end at the full moon and are used across the north.

The festivals land on the same days either way — only the month name for the dark fortnight differs. Muhurtha defaults to Amanta and shows both on a person's birth reading. Switch in the Festivals tab's options, or see which you're on in Settings.

How it's worked out

Muhurtha uses Drik Ganita — computed positions — rather than the older tabulated approximations. It carries its own ephemeris written in Swift:

The engine is checked against Drik Panchang for New Delhi — all five limbs, both karanas, sunrise and sunset, the months and the samvats — and that comparison is a permanent automated test, so it can't quietly drift. Eclipse times and magnitudes are checked against the NASA canon.

Elevation is off by default, because published panchangs compute sunrise at sea level and turning it on would put the app a couple of minutes out from what your family is reading. You can switch it on if you want the physically accurate time for a hill station.

Glossary

FAQ

Why don't the dates match the calendar on my wall?

Usually the month system or the tradition. Check whether your calendar uses Amanta or Purnimanta, and whether the festival you're looking at belongs to a region you've turned off. If it's a genuinely contested date, the app will say so on the day.

Why is Rahu Kaal a different time than I remember?

Because it's computed from your sunrise and sunset, not looked up. It moves with the city and with the season. The remembered "always 4:30 on a Saturday" is a rule of thumb for one latitude at one time of year.

Does it need internet?

No. Never, for anything in the Panchang. The only optional network call in the app is the phone's own geocoder: Apple's on iPhone, only if you search for a city that isn't in the bundled list; on Android, when you tap "Use my location" and the phone is asked to name the place.

Will it drain my battery?

No. A day's Panchang takes a few milliseconds to compute and nothing runs in the background except the notifications you asked for.

Is there a kundli or horoscope?

No, and there won't be. Muhurtha reports what the almanac records. It makes no predictions and reads no charts.

What years does it cover?

1900 to 2100. Everything in that span is computed, not tabulated.

Can I use it outside India?

Yes — that's a large part of why it exists. Pick your city and the whole calendar re-derives for your sunrise. The bundled city list covers the diaspora specifically.

Is my data backed up?

Saved places and family details live on the device only. There is no cloud sync, so reinstalling the app starts fresh.

Known limits

Worth being honest about.

• Languages. Every screen, festival, story, Learn topic and Ask reply worked out from the Panchang is written in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam as well as English. The translations have not yet been read through by native speakers, so expect the odd awkward phrase, and please tell us about them. The thousand written answers in Ask are in English only.
• Written answers. The thousand written answers in Ask were composed for the app and have not been reviewed by a priest or scholar. Practices around death rites, menstruation customs, gemstones and regional observances differ between families and communities, and those answers say so; follow your own family's practice.
• Days that depend on convention. Varalakshmi Vratam, Attukal Pongala and the Sant Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram observances are dated by the usual convention, and almanacs can differ by a day. Where the app knows a date is split, it says so on the day.
• Devotional texts. The aartis and chalisas need a proofread against an authoritative printed source before they can be called final. The Hanuman Chalisa is currently partial.
• Naming syllables. The nakshatra-pada table is the commonly published one, but families use it to name children, so it deserves checking against a printed source rather than being taken on trust.
• A few regional dates. Keddasa and Pattanaje are placed from published dates rather than from a computed rule, and the Tulu month-start convention follows the Tamil one. A local panchanga should have the last word.
• Solar eclipse visibility. The app can tell you the Sun is above your horizon at greatest eclipse, but not whether you're inside the shadow path — so it says exactly that, rather than claiming a visibility it can't establish.
• No lagna. Muhurat suggestions are day-level and window-level. The rising sign at a particular hour is a priest's job.

Privacy

No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking SDKs, no server. Locations, family details and preferences are stored on your device and never transmitted. Notifications are scheduled locally. Calendar access is write-only. There are no purchases.

The full policy is at aniketshetty.com/muhurtha/privacy, and questions are welcome via Support.