Abhijit Muhurat: what it is and how to find it
You will see Abhijit Muhurat quoted as a fixed time around midday. It is not one. It is the middle of the day’s fifteen muhurtas, which is why it falls at a different clock time in every city and every month.
Abhijit Muhurat is quoted everywhere as a time around midday, usually a window of about forty-eight minutes beginning near 11:45. Those numbers are real for somebody, on some day. For you, on today's date, they are probably wrong.
The reason is the same as for Rahu Kaal: it is not a clock time. It is a position in the day.
The fifteen muhurtas
Take the daylight — sunrise to sunset — and divide it into fifteen equal parts. Each is a muhurta. On a twelve-hour day each lasts forty-eight minutes; in summer, with longer days, they stretch, and in winter they shorten.
Abhijit is the eighth. Seven come before it and seven after, which puts it exactly in the middle of the daylight: it is centred on local solar noon, the moment the Sun is highest.
Abhijit means "victorious", and the tradition treats this window as one in which a start is favoured even when little else in the day is. When people say it is a good time to begin something and no better time is available, this is what they mean.
Why it is not at noon by your clock
Solar noon and clock noon are different things. India keeps a single time for the whole country, set by a meridian that runs through Uttar Pradesh near Mirzapur, but the Sun does not follow it.
- In Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which lie west of that meridian, the Sun is highest after twelve by the clock. Abhijit falls in the early afternoon.
- In Kolkata and Guwahati, east of it, the Sun is highest before twelve. Abhijit falls late in the morning.
On top of the east–west difference, the length of the day changes through the year, and so does the length of the window. A single printed time cannot be right across a country, or across a year.
What people do with it
It is most often used when a start cannot wait for a perfect time: a journey, a purchase, signing something, the first day at a new place. The advice is the same as for any muhurta — the window helps, and it does not replace the rest of your judgement.
One caution you will see: some panchangs mark Abhijit as unusable on Wednesdays. It is a rule some traditions apply and others do not. If your family follows it, check the weekday shown beside the window.
Finding yours
You need your city and today's date, because both change the answer. Our panchang page works out the muhurtas from your own sunrise and sunset, and the biggest cities have a page of their own — Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and more.
The panchang as a whole is explained in our guide to its five limbs.