Delhi Panchang

Across the 730 days tabulated here the sun rises in Delhi as early as 05:22 and as late as 07:15. Neither of those belongs to a single morning. Sunrise is printed to the whole minute, and within a few weeks of a solstice the true value moves by well under half a minute a day, so the printed time stops changing: the earliest stands on 19 days spread across both years and the latest on 15 days spread across both years. The longest day here is 13h 58m of daylight, held on 19 days spread across both years, and the shortest is 10h 19m, held on 11 days spread across both years.

How far daylight moves in Delhi

Between those two extremes daylight travels 219 minutes, and that figure is very nearly a direct reading of latitude. At 28.6139°N it puts Delhi 34th of 38 among the cities covered here, counted from the narrowest swing upward. Jammu has the widest swing of any city here at 260 minutes and Thiruvananthapuram the narrowest at 61 minutes, so Delhi sits nearer the mobile end. Further north the sun's rising point sweeps a longer arc along the horizon between the solstices, which is what a large swing measures.

Sunrise does not cross that range at an even rate. The fastest seven-day shift in Delhi is 9 minutes, in the week beginning 16 March 2026; the slowest week moves it by not one minute at all. Those slow weeks are what produce the longest flat stretch on the whole table: sunrise here reads 05:22 on 10 consecutive days, from 6 June 2026 to 15 June 2026. Nothing is wrong with the arithmetic there: the sun really does rise at a slightly different instant on each of those mornings, and the difference is smaller than the minute the table is written in.

That stretch begins within 15 days of the June solstice, which is where sunrise turns around and briefly stops moving. Two things push sunrise through the year: the sun’s changing declination, whose effect on the clock grows with latitude, and the equation of time, whose effect does not. At 28.6139°N the first dominates — sunrise here travels 113 minutes in all, 3.6 times the 31 minutes the equation of time moves local midday — so the turning point lands where declination turns, at the solstice.

Noon in Delhi is not twelve o’clock

India keeps one clock across roughly 29 degrees of longitude, fixed to the 82.5°E meridian. Delhi sits 5.29 degrees west of that line, and at four minutes to the degree that is 21 minutes. This part is arithmetic and it never moves: it is the same on every date of every year, and it means the sun stands highest over Delhi roughly 21 minutes after the clock reads noon rather than at noon.

What moves on top of it is the equation of time. The earth’s orbit is an ellipse and its axis is tilted, so the sun runs ahead of a uniform clock for part of the year and behind it for the rest. Measured across these 730 days, the midpoint of sunrise and sunset in Delhi falls between 12:04 and 12:35, a spread of 31 minutes. That spread is almost identical in every Indian city, because it belongs to the orbit rather than to the place. What is local is the 21 minutes of longitude the paragraph above worked out, and the two together are why midday here is never twelve o’clock. This is the correction that matters most in chart work, where a birth time copied off a wall clock is IST while the ascendant depends on where the sun actually stood.

Delhi sits in the western half of the cluster without being at its edge: 21 cities of the 38 lie further from the meridian and 16 cities closer to it. Across the whole cluster the correction spans 77 minutes, from Guwahati’s 37 minutes ahead of the clock to Ahmedabad’s 40 minutes behind it, so two cities keeping the same time can hold local noon more than an hour apart. The nearest city to Delhi on this measure is Gurgaon, whose own correction differs by 1 minute.

Why Rahu Kaal is not ninety minutes here

Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta are each one of eight equal parts of the interval from sunrise to sunset. Their length is therefore a fraction of daylight, and it moves with the season along with everything else on the table. In Delhi an eighth runs from 77 minutes to 105 minutes depending on the date. A source quoting a flat ninety minutes is out by more than ten minutes on 321 days of the 730, and by as much as 15 minutes at worst. Where it errs long it holds the window open past its real end, which is the direction that matters if the reason for knowing the window is to stay clear of it.

Abhijit is a fifteenth of the same interval rather than an eighth, so it is shorter and it swings less — 41 minutes to 56 minutes across the two years — and it is tied to local midday rather than to the clock, which is the section above restated. Brahma muhurat is the one window on these pages whose length never changes at all, because tradition defines it as a fixed span before sunrise rather than as a fraction of daylight: ninety-six minutes, every day of the year, moving only with sunrise itself.

One more consequence of measuring rather than assuming. Daylight in Delhi exceeds twelve hours on 390 of these 730 days, which is more than half of them — in 2026 it first passes twelve hours on 17 March 2026 and last holds it on 27 September 2026. The surplus is atmospheric rather than astronomical: sunrise is taken as the moment the sun’s upper edge clears the horizon, and refraction lifts the image of the disc, so the sun is visible for a few minutes before it geometrically rises and for a few minutes after it geometrically sets. Every city on this site shows the same surplus for the same reason, and it is the sort of claim a reader can check by reading down the day-length column on any month page below.

Delhi is the place the site’s national panchang table was computed for from the JPL DE421 ephemeris, so these pages print those tabulated values directly instead of recomputing them — which keeps them identical to the dated national pages rather than merely close to them. Every other city on this site is computed from its own coordinates and measured against Delhi.

These pages are also correct for Noida: across every tabulated day, sunrise there and each of the windows derived from it stay within a minute of Delhi’s, which is the precision quoted here, so a separate set of pages would only repeat this one.