Panchang by City

On 1 June 2026 the sun rises at 04:30 in Guwahati and 06:02 in Goa. That is 92 minutes apart on the same morning, in the same country, on the same clock. Every quantity a panchang derives from sunrise is that far apart too.

Tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana do not vary by city — they are positions of the Sun and Moon, read at sunrise, and the same everywhere in India. But Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta are each one eighth of the interval from sunrise to sunset, Abhijit is its middle fifteenth, and Brahma muhurat is the ninety-six minutes ending at sunrise. All five are local. A national table that prints one Rahu Kaal for the whole country is right about the limbs and wrong about every window.

Because an eighth is a fraction of daylight rather than a fixed span, its length moves with the season as well as the place. Across all 38 cities and 730 tabulated days — 27,740 city-days — the shortest eighth is 74.9 minutes and the longest 107.4, and both belong to Jammu: 599 minutes of daylight divided by eight on 4 days, and 859 on 7 days. A flat ninety minutes is within two minutes of the truth on 17% of those city-days and within ten minutes on 81%. It is a rounding of the middle of a wide range, not a rule.

Delhi is the reference: the site’s national panchang table was computed for it from the JPL DE421 ephemeris, so its pages show those tabulated values directly and every other city is computed from its own coordinates and compared against them.

Two things set the clock time of sunrise. One is longitude, which decides when the place passes under the sun and never changes. The other is latitude, which decides how much of the sun’s daily circle sits below the horizon — and that contribution is zero only when the sun stands over the equator. On the equinoxes it does, and no pair of the 38 cities is left out of longitude order at all: 11 of the 730 days in this table are like that, in 4 windows — 20 March 2026; 22 September 2026 to 25 September 2026; 19 March 2027 to 21 March 2027; 23 September 2027 to 25 September 2027. Even then the table cannot separate everything: sunrise is printed to the whole minute, and on those days 11 to 18 pairs of the 703 share a minute.

Away from those windows latitude takes over, and near a solstice it dominates. The count peaks at 160 of 703 pairs out of longitude order, on 5 days rather than one — 15 June 2026; 25 June 2026; 29 June 2026; 15 June 2027; 29 June 2027. June 2026 is close to a solstice, which is why the table above is scrambled: Visakhapatnam sits 6.4° east of Chandigarh and still sees the sun 1 minute later, because Chandigarh is 13.0° further north and a northern summer morning starts early enough to overturn six degrees of longitude.

The first city to see the sun is the same on every one of the 730 days: Guwahati, the easternmost here. The last is not. That position is held at some point by 6 cities, and which one it is says more about the season than about the map — Jammu on 218 days, 211 of them between November and February; Mumbai on 145 days, 103 of them in the equinox months; Ahmedabad on 116 days, 109 of them in the equinox months; Goa on 113 days, 112 of them between May and August; Kochi on 92 days, all of them between May and August; Jodhpur on 46 days, 24 of them in the equinox months.

The gap between the first sunrise and the last runs from 74 minutes to 94 minutes, so the country’s morning is more than an hour wide on every day in the table. It reaches its widest on 37 days, every one of them with Guwahati first and Kochi last, and its narrowest on 5 days.

How far daylight travels between the solstices is a direct reading of latitude, and across these cities it is very nearly nothing else. Sort the 38 by that swing and the order agrees with latitude on 698 of the 703 pairs; 4 pairs share a swing to the minute, which is no order at all, and exactly one pair disagrees — Madurai’s day swings 1 minute more than Kochi’s while sitting 668 metres further south. Thiruvananthapuram at 8.5241°N swings 61 minutes across the year; Jammu at 32.7266°N swings 260 minutes.