If you are familiar with the printed Nepali calendars (patros), this web version of the calendar should be mostly self-explanatory. Here is a short list of questions and answers that may not be obvious to everyone. Note that the words patro and calendar are used interchangeably in this document.
The patro is displayed in a tabular format. When you first open the Detailed Patro, the row of the current date (based on Nepal time) is highlighted. If you press any of the navigation buttons or enter a date in the input boxes, a different row will be highlighted depending on which button you pressed or what date you entered.
The table consists of 13 columns and a variable number of rows. It displays one lunar fortnight (पक्षः) in one page. The columns are as follows from left to right:
The buttons at the top of the patro can be used to navigate to other dates. The button labeled "Today" takes you to the current day. Buttons on its left take you to the past and the ones on the right take you to the future. The buttons labeled "Fortnight", "Month", and "Year" cause jumps of 14 days, 31 days, and 365 days respectively.
The input boxes at the bottom of the patro can be used to directly navigate to a specific date. Both English and Nepali dates are accepted as input. Gregorian dates from 1769 to 2068 or Vikram (Bikram) sambat from 1825 to 2125 are acceptable.
[Go to Top]Those columns give the exact time until when a particular tithi, nakshatra, yog, or karan is valid. For example if the tithi column says "सप्तमी" and the "बजेसम्म" column says 16:43, it simply means that the "सप्तमी" tithi is valid until 4:43 PM of that day and "अष्टमी" starts at that moment. Some बजेसम्म entries have a "+" sign around them. This is a notation to indicate that the time is for the next day. For example, if you see +4:32+, it means the time is 4:32 AM after the next midnight.
[Go to Top]Hindu calendars (including Nepali) assume that the day starts at sunrise, unlike most others which assume it starts at midnight. Although the solar day starts at sunrise, the lunar day (tithi) can start at any time during the day or night. Whichever tithi prevails at the time of sunrise becomes the tithi for that day. The exact time until when the tithi is valid is given on the column next to the tithi. Sometimes there may be no sunrises or two sunrises during the period of a particular tithi, which results in skipped or repeated tithis.
The same reasoning explains the skipped or repeated nakshatras, yogs, and karans.
[Go to Top]The lengths of lunar and solar months are not equal. A lunar month is roughly 29.5 days long, whereas a solar month is closer to 30.5 days. However, our calendar system attempts to make them run side-by-side by occasionally repeating (अधिकमास/मलमास) or skipping (क्षयमास) lunar months. Festivals are generally celebrated on regular months in case of अधिकमास and moved to adjacent months in case of क्षयमास. The web calendar is fully aware of such phenomenon and automatically performs the correct computation of lunar months.
[Go to Top]Those are tithis of a repeated month (अधिकमास).
[Go to Top]In general, No. However it requires a longer explanation to understand why you may not want to be bothered by it.
Some events, particularly our festivals, are based on the lunar date. Lunar date is dependent on the time of sunrise. So, the date of those events may not be accurate for your location if you are not in Nepal. The only reliable way to achieve accuracy is to take the local time of sunrise into account. Remember that converting your local time to Nepali time is not sufficient to correct this problem. It basically requires creating a local version of the calendar specific to your city. If you are a purist, you may want to be careful when using Nepal made calendars if you do not live in Nepal, because they may not be accurate for your location. But for the majority of people, calendars made for Nepal are good enough in practice. This problem is not specific to this web version of the calendar, but it is equally applicable to the printed calendars that you buy in Nepal and bring overseas.
[Go to Top]Yes. It is independent of where you live.
[Go to Top]The word panchanga (पञ्चाङ्ग) is used to describe a day. The literal meaning of panchanga is five organs, and it symbolizes five aspects of a day — day-of-week (वार), lunar phase (तिथि), nakshatra (नक्षत्र), yog (योग), and karan (करण). Here is a very brief description of each:
The column बजेसम्म next to tithi gives the ending time of that particular tithi. The starting time of the tithi is same as the ending time of the previous tithi, so it can be read from the previous row. Occasionally, a tithi may be skipped, in which case the starting time cannot be read from the previous row. In such a case, both the starting and ending times of the tithi are displayed on the same row. The starting and ending times of nakshatra and yog are found in the same way.
Determining the starting and ending times of a karan is a bit different because a karan only lasts for approximately half a day. One needs to consider the starting and ending times of the tithi as well as that of the karan to determine the exact starting and ending times of all karans. Note that in the calendar, every other karan is hidden to save space. If you are familiar with the way a karan is determined from the printed calendars of Nepal, you should have no difficulty using this web version.
[Go to Top][Note: the government's proposal to reform the calendar was unsuccessful. This question remains here only as historical information.]
Astronomers have long recognized the phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes and the resulting gradual drift of the solar months in relation to the seasons. The points of equinoxes move anticlockwise at the rate of about one degree every 72 years on the plane of the ecliptic causing the seasons to arrive approximately 20 minutes earlier every year. The seasons drift has accumulated to almost 24 days in the last 1700 years and affects the calendars that do not make regular adjustments to this effect. Fast forwarding our calendar by 24 days will align the months with the seasons that they represented almost two thousand years ago. Then the start of the year would roughly coincide with the start of the spring season (बसंत), or the vernal equinox.
The current government's proposal is to skip the twelfth month Chaitra (चैत्र) of year 2066 so that the accumulated shift is accounted for. In addition to the fast forwarding, other measures are necessary to prevent future accumulation of the shift. By skipping an entire month we will be one week ahead of the seasons. So, if no other measures are taken to compensate for the ongoing shift, we will have the correct seasonal alignment in about 500 years from now.
Until more details emerge of how exactly the changes will be implemented, this online patro will use existing calculations to compute future dates, and so there will still be twelve months in year 2066. However, once sufficient details of the calendar adjustments become available, the software will be appropriately modified to reflect the changes and it should give correct results for the affected dates
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