The Panchanga is the five-limbed Vedic almanac: tithi (lunar day), vara (weekday), nakshatra, yoga and karana. Together they describe the quality of a given day and place.
The Panchanga is the basis of muhurta — electing an auspicious time to begin something. It is calculated for a specific place, because sunrise differs by location.
A lunar day, defined by each twelve degrees of angular separation between the Moon and the Sun. There are thirty in a lunar month.
The vara is reckoned from local sunrise, and sunrise time varies by latitude and longitude — so the same instant can fall on different varas in different places.
Yoga is derived from the sum of the Sun's and Moon's longitudes and there are twenty-seven; a karana is half a tithi, and there are eleven that repeat through the month.
Yes — enter any date and place and the full five limbs are computed for it.
Occasional emails when something genuinely moves — eclipses, retrogrades, dasha shifts — written the same way as these articles. No horoscope spam.