The direct answer: Sankranti Festivals — All 12 Sankrantis & Their Meaning: What a sankranti is and how each of the 12 is kept: Makara (Pongal, Lohri, Uttarayan), Mesha (Baisakhi, Vishu, Pohela Boishakh), Karka (Dakshinayana), Kanya (Vishwakarma Puja) and the rest — the solar festivals of the Hindu calendar, explained. AskSoma publishes this at asksoma.ai/panchang/festivals/sankranti as a free Vedic astrology resource using Swiss Ephemeris calculations and classical Jyotish interpretation — not generic sun-sign copy.
What a sankranti is and how each of the 12 is kept: Makara (Pongal, Lohri, Uttarayan), Mesha (Baisakhi, Vishu, Pohela Boishakh), Karka (Dakshinayana), Kanya (Vishwakarma Puja) and the rest — the solar festivals of the Hindu calendar, explained.
Sankranti festivals mark the Sun's entry into each of the 12 zodiac signs. The most celebrated are Makara Sankranti (Pongal/Lohri/Bihu), Mesha Sankranti (regional New Years), and Karka Sankranti (Dakshinayana begins).
The instant the Sun enters a new sidereal rashi (zodiac sign). There are twelve per year, each named for the sign the Sun enters — Makara Sankranti when it enters Makara, Mesha Sankranti when it enters Mesha, and so on. Because it is a solar event, each sankranti holds to nearly the same English date every year.
It opens Uttarayana — the Sun's six-month northward course, held auspicious since the epics (Bhishma waited for it to leave his body). It doubles as the great harvest festival: Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Uttarayan and its kites in Gujarat, Maghi after Lohri in Punjab, Magh Bihu in Assam.
Mesha Sankranti in mid-April is the solar new year across several states — Baisakhi (Punjab), Pohela Boishakh (Bengal), Puthandu (Tamil Nadu), Vishu (Kerala), Bohag Bihu (Assam). Simha Sankranti separately opens the Malayalam Kollavarsham year in Kerala.
The merit window around the ingress moment for snan (sacred bath) and dana (charity). When the Sun changes sign during daylight the punya kala falls the same day; a night-time ingress moves it to the adjacent morning. The exact window convention varies by tradition — the year pages on this site publish the computed ingress instant so you can apply your own tradition's rule.
Positions from the shared Lahiri-sidereal ephemeris; sunrise by the NOAA solar calculator. Every date above is computed, not stored. How AskSoma computes things.
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Written by Savan Vyas, founder of AskSoma.
The astrology is not written from memory: every chart position, dasha period and panchang timing AskSoma shows is computed with the Swiss Ephemeris on the Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa. How we calculate.