What Tithi Praveśa actually is
A tithi is a lunar day — the span in which the Moon gains 12° on the Sun. Thirty of them make a lunar month. The tithi you were born under is fixed by the angular distance between the Sun and the Moon at your birth, and that distance is what returns.
The calculation runs in two steps. First, find the moment the Sun re-enters the sign it occupied at your birth — this marks the beginning of the year in this reckoning. Then, from that ingress, find the moment the exact natal Sun–Moon differential recurs. That is the Tithi Praveśa.
The precision matters. A common shortcut takes the start of the birth tithi rather than the exact differential, which fires roughly a day early and moves the annual Lagna by a considerable margin. This calculator solves for the differential itself.
The chart is cast for the latitude and longitude of your birth place, not wherever you happen to be living. This is one of the settled points in the technique: the annual chart is anchored to the birth location.
Tithi Praveśa is not a solar return — and not classical varṣaphala
These are three different things, and most pages on this subject blur them. The distinction changes the date by days and the chart entirely.
| Method | What returns | Falls when |
|---|---|---|
| Tithi Praveśa | The exact Sun–Moon relationship — a luni-solar return. | Anywhere within roughly a fortnight of the calendar birthday, moving each year. |
| Solar return (varṣa-praveśa) | The Sun alone, to its exact natal degree. | Within a day of the calendar birthday, every year. |
| Tropical solar return | The Sun to its natal degree in the tropical zodiac. | On or beside the calendar birthday — the western annual chart. |
The three are genuinely different techniques with different literatures. What this page computes is Tithi Praveśa. The parallel with varṣaphala is real — both give an annual chart with a year lord and a muntha — but the moment being caught is not the same one, and a page that offers you "varshphal" while computing a tithi return has told you something untrue about its own method.
The three things to read first
Everything else in an annual chart is read against these.
- The Year Lagna
- The ascendant of the annual chart. Its relationship to your natal Lagna sets the theme of the year: a Year Lagna in your natal 10th makes it a year about standing and work, one in your natal 12th makes it a year of expenditure, withdrawal or foreign matters. This single comparison carries more than any other detail in the chart.
- The Year Lord (Varṣeśa)
- The graha that governs the year, functioning rather like a chief executive for the twelve months: whichever yogas are live, it is the Year Lord that carries them out. Read its dignity and placement in the annual chart, and read what it rules in your natal chart — the two together tell you what the year will actually be spent on.
- The Muntha
- A progressed point that advances one sign per year from your natal Lagna: at birth it sits on the Lagna, at one year it moves to the 2nd sign, and so on around the wheel every twelve years. The house the Muntha occupies in the annual chart is the department of life that is activated for that year. It is the simplest device in the technique and one of the more reliable.
How to use the result
Start with the span. The year does not run January to December; it runs from this Tithi Praveśa to the next, and the next one is not twelve months later to the day. Everything read from the annual chart applies to that span and to no other.
Then place the Year Lagna against your natal chart and note which natal house it falls in. That is the year's subject, and it usually turns out to be an accurate one-line summary.
Then the Muntha's house in the annual chart, and the condition of the Year Lord. Between these three you have the frame; the rest of the annual chart fills it in.
Finally, cross-check the year against your running daśā. The annual chart says what the year is about; the daśā says whether the conditions exist for it to amount to anything. A promising annual chart inside an unhelpful daśā gives an interesting year and a modest one.
Why the tithi rather than the Sun
A solar return catches the Sun alone — the soul, the vital principle, one factor. A tithi return catches the Sun and Moon together, which is to say the relationship between the soul and the mind. Since a lived year is experienced through the mind and not only through the vital principle, the luni-solar moment is held to describe the year as it will actually be undergone. That is the argument for the technique, and it is also why the Tithi Praveśa moment wanders across the calendar while a solar return does not.
Why the annual chart needs a precise birth time
The Tithi Praveśa moment is found from the Sun–Moon angular difference at birth, and the Moon moves about half a degree an hour. A birth time out by an hour shifts the natal differential by roughly half a degree, which moves the moment the differential recurs by an hour or more — and the Year Lagna moves with it. Since the whole annual reading is built on the Year Lagna, an uncertain birth time makes the year chart uncertain in the same measure. The Muntha is the exception: it advances a sign per year from the natal Lagna and is unaffected by anything smaller than a Lagna sign change.
How this is computed
Positions come from an astronomical ephemeris, converted to the sidereal zodiac on the Lahiri (Citrapakṣa) ayanāṁśa and computed by our own Parāśara engine — no pre-written results, and no language model anywhere near a number. Where the classical texts disagree, this page names the convention we follow instead of quietly picking one.