Free Ghatak Chakra Calculator

Choose your Moon sign above, or enter your birth details and let the tool find it, and this free calculator gives your ghatak chakra: the Moon sign, tithi, weekday, nakshatra and rising sign that the Muhurta Chintamani marks ghata (unfavourable) for a person of your Moon sign. Add a date and the place you will be, and it says which of them fall on that day, read at local sunrise as a daily panchang reads the day. The text gives these marks for four undertakings only, royal service, a dispute, travel and battle, and adds “not elsewhere”, so they are not a list of bad days for anything else.

How it works

The rules come from Rama Daivajna’s Muhurta Chintamani, in its chapter on journeys (Yatra prakarana, the 11th), verses 27 to 34. We checked them in three editions: the Hindi bhasha-tika edition, pp. 176 to 181 (A); Pt. Mahidhar Sharma’s Hindi commentary, Khemraj Shri Krishna Das, Mumbai, pp. 122 to 123 (B); and Pyarelal Mishra’s commentary, edited by Pt. Sitaram Mishra, Chhannulal Gyanchand, Varanasi, 1939, pp. 186 to 190 (C). The verse numbers on this page are those of B; A numbers the lagna verse 34. All three agree on these five marks:

• Ghata Moon (verse 27): a sign counted from your Moon sign at birth (janma rashi), your own sign being the 1st. The verse ends “rajasevavivade yatrayuddhadye ca nanyatra varjyah”: to be avoided in royal service, a dispute, travel, battle and the like, and not elsewhere.
• Ghata tithi (verse 30): one of the five tithi groups, Nanda (the 1st, 6th and 11th tithi), Bhadra (2nd, 7th, 12th), Jaya (3rd, 8th, 13th), Rikta (4th, 9th, 14th) and Purna (5th, 10th, 15th).
• Ghata weekday (verse 31): one weekday. Brihat Jyotish Sara (Suryanarayan Siddhanti, edited by Krishnamurari Mishra, Tejkumar, Lucknow, 1972, “ghatavara vichara” verses 1 to 2) gives the same weekdays.
• Ghata nakshatra (verse 32): one nakshatra, the Moon’s nakshatra of the day.
• Ghata lagna (verse 33): one rising sign, named outright rather than counted from yours.

Your Moon sign is found the way the other Moon sign tools here find it: the sidereal Moon (Lahiri ayanamsa) at your birth moment, from the NASA JPL DE440 tables. Without a birth time the tool follows the Moon over your birth date at the birth place, and if it changed sign that day, both signs and their ghatak chakras are shown.

For a date, the tool reads the tithi, the nakshatra and the Moon’s sign at local sunrise at the place you give, the moment a daily panchang uses, and takes the weekday as running from that sunrise to the next. If the tithi, the nakshatra or the Moon’s sign changes before the next sunrise, it lists the change with its time and says whether the new one is a ghata item for you.

Reading the result

The answer names the ghata items that fall on the date at sunrise, or says that none does, and the table below it shows each one. Read them in the scope the text gives: verse 27 names royal service, a dispute, travel and battle, and adds “not elsewhere”; the rest of the list stands in the same chapter on journeys, so this tool reads all of it that way. Where a date carries a ghata item, tradition would choose another day for one of those four; for everything else the text itself says the mark does not apply. Nothing here is a forecast, and ordinary life goes on as usual.

The ghata lagna changes through the day as the signs rise one after another; the Lagna table shows when each sign rises at your place. For choosing a day to travel, the travel muhurat page covers the checks of the same chapter that are the same for everyone, and Chandrabala and Tarabala cover the Moon and birth star counts.

Where traditions differ

The ghata pada (verses 28 to 29). All three commentaries give a ghata quarter (pada) of a nakshatra as the view of some acharyas, not as the text’s own rule, and they print some of it differently. The tool shows it in your table with that label and does not check a date against it.

The ghata month. It is not in the Muhurta Chintamani. Four printed almanacs and handbooks give it, in two versions that agree only for Mesha and Vrishabha, and none of them cites a verse: Martanda Panchangam (1949 to 50, Motilal Banarasidass, p. 70) and Ojha’s Sugam Jyotish Praveshika (1959, p. 317) give version 1; Tripathi’s Muhurta Deepak (1958, pp. 145 to 147) and Mishra’s Indian Ephemeris (2024, p. 172) give version 2. The tool shows both and checks a date against neither.

Almanacs that differ from the text. A few printed tables change a cell: Martanda Panchangam gives Saturday for the Meena ghata weekday, where the text has Friday, and leaves Vrishabha blank; Mishra’s Indian Ephemeris gives the 4th sign for the Vrishabha ghata Moon, where the text has the 5th. This tool follows the text.

Counting the tithi. Verse 30 names a group, not a half of the month, so the tool marks a group’s tithis in both the bright and the dark half, counting each half from 1 to 15. Amavasya, the 15th of the dark half, then falls in Purna with Purnima. That counting is our reading; the verse gives only the group names.

Near a change. The nakshatra and the Moon’s sign depend on the ayanamsa. An almanac using another one, or another city’s sunrise, can put a change some minutes earlier or later, which matters only when a change falls close to sunrise.

What it does not do

It does not give the ghata prahar (watch of the day). Only one of the four handbooks above gives it, Tripathi’s Muhurta Deepak (1958), and we could not check it against a second source, so it is left out. Some almanacs also add a row for women (stri chandra); it is not in the text and is not shown.

It does not judge a whole day or choose a muhurat, does not check the ghata pada, the ghata month or the ghata lagna against a date, and makes no prediction. Dates from 1900 to 2074 can be entered. Before 1951 the clock of a place comes from your browser’s time zone database, which can hold local mean time rather than the standard time then in use. To find your Moon sign first, use the Moon sign calculator.

Frequently asked questions