Margashirsha Amavasya 2026: Date, Bhaumavati and Kartika

The December new moon of 2026 raises three separate questions, and they have three separate answers. Which day is the Amavasya? Tuesday, 8 December 2026, at New Delhi. What kind of Amavasya is it? A Tuesday one, which north Indian calendars single out by name. And which month does it belong to? That depends on whether your calendar starts its months at the full moon or at the new moon, and the two answers here are a whole month apart.

The New Moon Arrives Before Wednesday’s New Delhi Sunrise (मार्गशीर्ष अमावस्या)

The Amavasya tithi ends at the new moon itself, which the site’s DE421 lunation table places at 06:21 on Wednesday 9 December 2026. Its start, at 04:13 on 8 December 2026, has no row in the festival tables and is computed with the site’s lunar code, which agrees with the generated tables to within 1 minute on the 86 tithi instants where both give a value; for the end of this tithi it agrees with the lunation table too.

Set those against the New Delhi sunrises. On Monday the 7th sunrise at 07:00 still finds Krishna Chaturdashi. The Amavasya begins in the small hours of the 8th, well before that morning’s sunrise at 07:01, so Tuesday dawns on Amavasya and stays in it all day and all night. Then the new moon comes at 06:21 the next morning, 41 minutes ahead of the 07:02 sunrise, and Wednesday dawns on Shukla Pratipada. One sunrise inside the tithi, and only one: the 8th is the Amavasya day by the sunrise rule.

That last margin is a New Delhi figure, and it is not large. Sunrise comes earlier the farther east you go, and by the site’s sunrise code Kolkata’s sunrise on the 9th is at 06:04, within half an hour of the new moon. At that distance this page will not say which side of the new moon a sunrise in the east falls on; a local panchang in Kolkata, Bhubaneswar or Guwahati may show the Amavasya at two sunrises. In all of them the sunrise of 8 December is Amavasya.

A Tuesday Amavasya: Bhaumavati

The north Indian calendars give an Amavasya a second name when it coincides with certain weekdays. One that falls on a Monday is Somvati Amavasya; one that falls on a Tuesday, the day of Mangal (also called Bhauma, the son of the earth), is Bhaumavati Amavasya, often shortened to Bhauma Amavasya. The 2026 December Amavasya holds the sunrise of a Tuesday, so the panchangs that use the term will print it here.

The label marks a coincidence of tithi and weekday, nothing more, and it is read from the sunrise day. This page reports the name and does not attach a result to it.

Margashirsha in the North, Kartika in the West and South

The name in the title is the purnimanta one. In the purnimanta reckoning of north India a month runs from the day after one full moon to the next full moon. The full moon before this Amavasya is Kartik Purnima, at 20:23 on 24 November 2026, so the dark fortnight that follows opens the month of Margashirsha, and this Amavasya stands in the middle of that month.

Amanta calendars — in Maharashtra, Gujarat and the south — run each month from new moon to new moon, so the Amavasya is always a month’s last day, not its midpoint. The month that opens at the new moon of 9 November 2026, the one that ends Diwali’s month of Ashwina, is Kartika there, and it closes with this new moon. In those calendars the same tithi is Kartika Amavasya. Their Margashirsha begins with the Shukla Pratipada on the 9th; its fifth day is Vivah Panchami on 14 December, which both systems call Margashirsha because shukla-paksha names agree.

So “Kartika Amavasya” printed against a December date, or “Margashirsha Amavasya” against a January one, is an amanta name, not an error. For the full moon that sets the northern month boundary, see Kartik Purnima 2026.

Tarpan in the Afternoon

In the Dharmashastra manuals every Amavasya carries a monthly offering to the ancestors, the darsha shraddha, and they set its tarpan, the offering of water with sesame, in the aparahna, the afternoon portion of the day. On the 8th the question of which afternoon does not arise: the tithi begins before dawn and runs on past sunset at 17:24 into the next morning, so the whole afternoon lies inside it. The site does not compute an aparahna window in minutes, and none is given; the family purohit or a printed panchang will have the local one. The yearly Amavasya set aside for the ancestors is Sarva Pitru Amavasya at the end of Pitru Paksha, which has its own computed page: Sarva Pitru Amavasya 2027.

The Moon at Conjunction: Jyeshtha in Scorpio

At a new moon the Sun and Moon stand at the same sidereal longitude, and the lunation table places this one in Scorpio, in the nakshatra Jyeshtha, which covers Scorpio 16°40′ – 30°00′. That is a different reading from the daily panchang’s nakshatra column for the Amavasya day, which samples the Moon at sunrise: at sunrise on the 8th the Moon is in Anuradha, the nakshatra before it in the same sign, and by sunrise on the 9th the table has it in Jyeshtha. Neither value is a condition of the Amavasya, which is fixed by the tithi alone.

The Next One Falls Inside Kharmas

The Dhanu Kharmas in the site’s table runs from 16 December 2026 to 14 January 2027, opening a little after this Amavasya. The next new moon, at 01:54 on 8 January 2027, falls inside it, and the daily table has Amavasya at sunrise on Thursday 7 January 2027. North Indian calendars call that one Paush Amavasya; in amanta calendars it is Margashirsha Amavasya, which is why the name in this page’s title turns up again in January. The Kharmas page explains what the custom defers during that window.

Quick Reference

• Amavasya at sunrise (New Delhi): Tuesday, 8 December 2026, sunrise 07:01, sunset 17:24
• Tithi: 04:13 on 8 December (computed) to the new moon at 06:21 on 9 December (DE421)
• Names: Margashirsha Amavasya (purnimanta); Kartika Amavasya (amanta); Bhaumavati Amavasya (Tuesday)
• New moon position: Scorpio, Jyeshtha
• Next Amavasya at sunrise: 7 January 2027, inside the Dhanu Kharmas

Check the sunrise tithi for your own city with the panchang calculator, and see the 2026 festival calendar and the festival pages for the rest of the year. In Hindi: मार्गशीर्ष अमावस्या 2026: तारीख, भौमवती और कार्तिक का नाम.