Raat ka Choghadiya — the night table, and where it comes from

Night gets its own eight slots, sunset to next sunrise, and its own starting point — and the rule is not "carry on where daylight stopped". A weekday’s night opens on the choghadiya belonging to the weekday 4 days later. Sunday night opens on Shubh, which is Thursday’s. That one substitution generates all seven night rows.

raat ka choghadiya — the night table, and where it comes from, choghadiya, chogadia, shubh muhurat

Sunset to next sunrise, divided by eight. Night is not the daytime sequence continued, and the rule that replaces it is one line long.

Raat ka choghadiya covers the interval from sunset to the following sunrise, cut into eight equal parts exactly as daylight is. Because night is longer than day for half the year and shorter for the other half, a night slot is not the same length as a day slot on the same date — in Indian cities the two cross over only at the equinoxes.

The part people get wrong is the starting point. It would be tidy if night simply continued the cycle from where sunset left off, and it does not. Every weekday’s night opener sits exactly 5 places along the cycle from that same weekday’s day opener — not one place, not eight, and the same 5 on every row.

Restated in the vocabulary people actually use: your night runs on the choghadiya of the weekday 4 days from now. Tuesday night opens on Kaal, which is Saturn’s, which is Saturday’s — and Tuesday plus 4 is Saturday. That is the whole night table in one sentence.

One rule, seven rows

Take a weekday’s day opener, count 5 forward through the fixed cycle, and that is its night opener. Doing it for all seven weekdays reproduces the night matrix exactly — which is the check that the rule is real and not a coincidence someone noticed on one row.

The reason the same rule can be phrased two ways — a cycle offset, or a different weekday — is that the choghadiya names and the weekdays are drawn from the same seven planets. Anything you can say about the cycle you can also say about the calendar.

Weekday	Day opens on	Night opens on	Night opener’s lord	Whose weekday that is
Sunday	Udveg	Shubh	Jupiter	Thursday
Monday	Amrit	Chal	Venus	Friday
Tuesday	Rog	Kaal	Saturn	Saturday
Wednesday	Labh	Udveg	Sun	Sunday
Thursday	Shubh	Amrit	Moon	Monday
Friday	Chal	Rog	Mars	Tuesday
Saturday	Kaal	Labh	Mercury	Wednesday

The last two columns are the same fact twice: the night opener’s planet rules the weekday 4 days on.

Which nights the engine likes, and by how little

The same arithmetic that ranks daylight ranks night, because night also contains all seven names plus a repeat of its opener. Totals are 4.45 + opener, over eight slots.

Thursday night is the strongest, opening on Amrit for a mean of 0.675. Tuesday night is the weakest at 0.596, opening on Kaal. The spread is 0.079 — the same narrow band as daylight, and for the same structural reason.

Combining both halves gives the only ranking that describes a whole vedic day, sunrise to sunrise: Thursday comes out highest at 0.671 and Tuesday lowest at 0.598. Note that this is not the daylight ranking with the same order — a weekday can carry a strong day and a weak night, which is a distinction a day-only table cannot express.

Weekday	Night opens on	Favourable night slots (of 8)	Mean night score	Mean over all 16
Sunday	Shubh	5	0.666	0.635
Monday	Chal	5	0.646	0.661
Tuesday	Kaal	4	0.596	0.598
Wednesday	Udveg	4	0.604	0.633
Thursday	Amrit	5	0.675	0.671
Friday	Rog	4	0.600	0.623
Saturday	Labh	5	0.662	0.629

A night slot is not a day slot

Daylight and night together always make 24 hours, so as one half stretches the other compresses. At the June solstice in northern India a daytime choghadiya can run close to 1h 45m while the night slots that follow it are down near 1h 15m; in late December the two swap. They are equal only within a few days of an equinox.

This matters more at night than by day because night slots are the ones people plan around least and notice most: a Labh that "should" begin at 21:00 in June begins closer to 22:00 in December, purely because sunset moved. The city pages in this cluster give the real night-slot range for eleven Indian cities.

One consequence worth flagging: the vedic day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. The night slots after midnight still belong to the previous calendar weekday. A table that switches names at 00:00 has made an error the tradition does not make.

The full night grid

Rows are weekdays — the weekday the night BEGAN on, not the one it ends on. Columns are the eight parts of night in order, from sunset.

Night of	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th
Sunday	Shubh	Amrit	Chal	Rog	Kaal	Labh	Udveg	Shubh
Monday	Chal	Rog	Kaal	Labh	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit	Chal
Tuesday	Kaal	Labh	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit	Chal	Rog	Kaal
Wednesday	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit	Chal	Rog	Kaal	Labh	Udveg
Thursday	Amrit	Chal	Rog	Kaal	Labh	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit
Friday	Rog	Kaal	Labh	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit	Chal	Rog
Saturday	Labh	Udveg	Shubh	Amrit	Chal	Rog	Kaal	Labh

As with daylight, the eighth entry repeats the first: seven names, eight slots.

What the night slots are traditionally used for

Night choghadiya is used far more narrowly than the daytime table, and the honest version of that is a short list rather than a full parallel system.

Travel and departures

The dominant historical use. Overnight journeys were chosen against the night table, and Chal — the movement slot — is the one being looked for.

Arrivals and receiving

Amrit and Shubh at night for welcoming someone, bringing something new into the house, or a homecoming.

Trade that runs late

Labh at night keeps its daytime meaning for anything commercial — a shipment logged, a deal closed by message.

What it is NOT used for

Ceremonies, weddings and inaugurations are elected against a full muhurat, not a night choghadiya. Reaching for the night table for those is a category error.

Deriving Wednesday night without opening the table

The claim is that one rule generates every night row. Wednesday is the sharpest test, because its night opener is the least intuitive of the seven.

Step	Value
Wednesday’s lord	Mercury — so daylight opens on Labh, Mercury’s choghadiya
Count 5 forward through the fixed cycle from Labh	Labh → Amrit → Kaal → Shubh → Rog → Udveg
Night opener	Udveg — lord Sun
Cross-check against the calendar	Wednesday + 4 = Sunday, whose lord is Sun — the same answer from the other direction

Wednesday night opens on Udveg, then runs the fixed cycle: Udveg → Shubh → Amrit → Chal → Rog → Kaal → Labh → Udveg. Both derivations agree, which is what makes the rule usable rather than a mnemonic that works on the rows you happened to check.

The names are the easy part. The clock times are not derivable this way at all — they need your local sunset, which is why every genuinely useful night table is location-specific.

Frequently asked

Which choghadiya is best at night?

By name, Amrit — the same ordering holds after dark as before it (0.95 against 0.88 for Shubh). By weekday, Thursday night is the strongest overall because it opens on Amrit, and Tuesday night the weakest.

Why is the night choghadiya different from the day choghadiya?

Because night starts from a different point in the same cycle. A weekday’s night opens on the choghadiya of the weekday 4 days later — Sunday night on Thursday’s Shubh, Monday night on Friday’s Chal — which is 5 places along the cycle from that weekday’s own day opener.

How long is a night choghadiya?

One eighth of the interval from sunset to the next sunrise. In Indian cities that runs roughly 1h 15m at midsummer to about 1h 43m in late December — the inverse of what daylight is doing on the same date, because the two always sum to 24 hours.

Does the night choghadiya change at midnight?

No. The vedic day runs sunrise to sunrise, so the slots that fall after midnight still belong to the weekday that began at the previous sunrise. The name only rolls over at the next sunrise.

Is raat ka choghadiya used for travel?

It is the main traditional use. Overnight departures were chosen against this table, and Chal — the movement slot, ruled by Venus — is the one being looked for. That is also why Chal scores as favourable-but-modest: it is specialised rather than broadly auspicious.

What this page can NOT tell you

• The night table cannot tell you whether to travel. It ranks one layer of one convention; road, weather and whether you have slept outrank all of it.
• Night slots after midnight belong to the previous weekday’s row. Any tool — including a printed panchang — that rolls the name over at 00:00 will disagree with this page, and it is the one making the error.
• The night half is genuinely less developed in the tradition than the day half. Where this page is quiet about a use case, that is because the sources are, not because we trimmed it.
• No part of this is personalised. Your chart, your dasha and your transits are absent from the calculation entirely.
• The subscores shown are AskSoma’s internal ranking weights for ordering muhurat windows. They are not a claim about outcomes.

Choghadiya is a folk-electional convention, not a prediction. It labels slices of the day by tradition; it does not know what you are doing, who you are, or how it turned out. Treat a label as a preference, and never as permission or prohibition.

How AskSoma computes and what we refuse to claim · Engine: NOAA solar position (sunrise/sunset), ±1 minute against published almanac times · Ayanamsa: not used — choghadiya is a sunrise-to-sunset division, with no sidereal component · Content reviewed 2026-08-08