Karthigai Deepam 2026 Date: Krittika in Karthigai

A Star Inside a Solar Month (கார்த்திகை தீபம்)

Most of the festivals on this site are fixed by a tithi. Karthigai Deepam is not. The Tamil calendar fixes it by two other clocks at once: the Sun has to be in the solar month of Karthigai, which is its passage through sidereal Scorpio, and the Moon has to be in Krittika, the nakshatra from which both the Tamil month and the northern lunar month Kartika take their names. In 2026 the day that satisfies both is Tuesday, 24 November 2026, and its evening is the night of the Maha Deepam on the hill at Tiruvannamalai, behind the Arunachaleswarar temple.

Finding the Day: One Krittika in the Window

The site’s ingress table puts the Sun’s entry into sidereal Scorpio at 19:39 on 16 November 2026, and its move on into Sagittarius at 10:20 on 16 December 2026. Those are the astronomical bounds. How a Tamil almanac turns the first instant into the opening day of its month is a convention of its own, and this page gives no date for the start of Karthigai.

It does not need one. The Moon goes round the nakshatras in a little over twenty-seven days, so a solar month can hold Krittika once or, in some years, twice. Checked day by day across the whole window, both in the daily panchang’s sunrise column and in the Moon’s own nakshatra segments from the site’s lunar code, Krittika turns up on exactly one civil day: the 24th, eight days after the ingress. The Moon’s previous pass through Krittika came before the Sun reached Scorpio, and its next comes after the Sun has left. There is no second candidate to choose between.

Dawn and Dusk Under the Same Nakshatra

The festival has two moments, and they sit at opposite ends of the day. In the temple custom at Tiruvannamalai, the Bharani Deepam is lit inside the shrine before dawn on the Deepam day; at dusk the Maha Deepam is lit on the summit of Annamalai, the hill behind the temple, and Tamil households set out rows of clay lamps that evening. A nakshatra that changed between morning and evening would split those two moments across two stars.

In 2026 it does not. The Moon enters Krittika in the early hours of the 24th and leaves it late that night. At New Delhi that covers the pre-dawn window (the daily panchang’s Brahma Muhurat is 05:14-06:50), sunrise at 06:50 and sunset at 17:24, each with more than an hour to spare. Chennai, the nearest city in the site’s list to Tiruvannamalai, has sunrise at 06:11 and sunset at 17:39 on the same day, and both again fall well inside Krittika. The sunrises either side read Bharani on the 23rd and Rohini on the 25th. Whichever part of the day a calendar reads the nakshatra at, it lands on the 24th.

The minute at which the Moon crosses into or out of Krittika is not printed here; those boundaries come from a lunar series rather than the generated tables, and the day-parts above are all the argument needs. A nakshatra crossing is the same instant everywhere in India, so the conclusion does not change with the city; only the sunrise and sunset times do.

The Same Day as Kartik Purnima

The Tamil star-day and the northern full-moon day coincide this year. The festival table gives Kartik Purnima on Tuesday 24 November 2026, with the Purnima tithi running from 23:42 on 23 November 2026 to 20:23 on 24 November 2026. The lunation table puts the full moon itself at 20:23 that evening, with the Moon in Taurus, in Krittika. So the Maha Deepam is lit under a Purnima that still has some hours to run after sunset, in the nakshatra that names the month.

One field can look like a contradiction. The Kartik Purnima row lists its nakshatra as Bharani, and the reason is the instant it is read at: the generator records the Moon’s nakshatra when the tithi begins, late on the 23rd, when the Moon was still in Bharani. By the early hours of the 24th it has moved on into Krittika, which is what the daily panchang shows at sunrise. The Kartik Purnima 2026 page sets out the two readings and why both are right. For Karthigai Deepam it is the sunrise reading that matters. The dawn lamp’s name points the other way, to Bharani, the nakshatra just before Krittika; how the temple times that lamp against the stars is its own reckoning, and this page does not guess at it.

The coincidence is a fact about 2026, not a rule. The Purnima and the Krittika day drift apart in some years, and where they do the Tamil calendar follows the star.

Arunachala and the Column of Fire (अरुणाचल)

The story behind the hilltop flame is Shaiva. In the Shiva Purana’s account, Brahma and Vishnu fall into a dispute over which of them is greater, and a column of fire appears between them with no visible beginning or end. Vishnu, as a boar, digs down to find its base; Brahma, as a swan, flies up to find its top; neither reaches an end, and the column is revealed as Shiva. The Arunachala Mahatmya, the Skanda Purana’s section on Tiruvannamalai, identifies the hill itself with that column. The lamp on the summit is read, in the temple’s own tradition, as the column shown again.

Two other threads run through the day. In the Tamil Shaiva grouping of five temples for the five elements, Tiruvannamalai is the temple of fire, and the site’s nakshatra table gives Krittika’s presiding deity as Agni, the fire itself. And Tamil Murugan devotion keeps the Krittika day of each month, after the Puranic birth story in which the six Krittikas nurse the infant Skanda, who takes from them the name Karttikeya.

The festival programme at Tiruvannamalai, for the temple and for the hill, is the temple’s to announce, and this page gives none of it. It describes the lamps without claiming anything for what they do.

Karthigai Deepam 2026 at a Glance

• Date: Tuesday, 24 November 2026
• Moon: in Krittika from the early hours of the day until late that night
• Sun: in sidereal Scorpio since 19:39 on 16 November 2026
• Sunrise and sunset: 06:50 and 17:24 at New Delhi; 06:11 and 17:39 at Chennai
• Same day: Kartik Purnima, with the full moon at 20:23

Krittika’s fuller entry is on the Krittika nakshatra page, and the guide to the 27 nakshatras places it in the sequence. The daily panchang shows the nakshatra at sunrise for any date, how to read a panchang explains the columns, and the 2026 festival calendar and festival pages have the rest of the year.