--- title: "Rahu Kaal Timing: The Eighth Part Nobody Owns" slug: "rahu-kaal-timing" canonical_url: "https://mahadasha.com/rahu-kaal-timing" description: "Rahu Kaal timing is one eighth of the daylight, so it runs 77 to 104 minutes, not a flat 90. The weekday table, and why it cannot be derived." published_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" modified_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" author: "Pawan Acharya" keywords: "rahu kaal timing, rahu kalam today, rahu kaal calculation, rahu kaal weekday table, inauspicious time, rahu kala meaning" locale: "en" --- # Rahu Kaal Timing: The Eighth Part Nobody Owns > Rahu Kaal is an eighth of the daylight, so it stretches and shrinks with the season. And unlike its two companions, it cannot be derived from a planet. # Rahu Kaal Timing: The Eighth Part Nobody Owns Rahu Kaal timing works like this. Take the daylight, from sunrise to sunset, and cut it into eight equal parts. One of those eight belongs to Rahu, and which one depends only on the weekday. That part is the window traditionally avoided for starting anything you want to go well. Two things follow immediately, and both contradict what most sources print. The window is not 90 minutes. And of the three inauspicious eighth-parts in a panchang, this is the only one whose weekday table cannot be worked out from first principles. ## Which eighth part, by weekday Counting the parts from sunrise, part 1 first: - Sunday: part 8, the last before sunset - Monday: part 2 - Tuesday: part 7 - Wednesday: part 5 - Thursday: part 6 - Friday: part 4 - Saturday: part 3 Read down that column and there is no pattern. 8, 2, 7, 5, 6, 4, 3. It does not ascend, it does not descend, it does not step by a constant amount. Every traditional source gives the same seven numbers, and they are usually taught as a mnemonic because there is nothing else to hold on to. ## Why Rahu Kaal timing cannot be derived Its two companions can be. If you deal the seven planetary lords onto parts 1 through 7 starting from the day's own lord, Gulika turns out to be Saturn's part on all seven days and Yamaganda turns out to be Jupiter's on all seven. Neither table needs storing. You search for the planet and the number falls out. Try the same search for Rahu and it fails, for a reason that is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it. Rahu is not one of the seven hora lords. It is a shadow point, not a body, and the sequence that fills the eighth-parts runs Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn with no place for it. There is no Rahu to find, so there is no rule to recover. That leaves the eighth part, the one left over when seven lords have taken theirs, as the obvious candidate. And on Sunday that is exactly what Rahu Kaal is: part 8. But on the other six days it is not, so even that does not hold. The table is an assignment, handed down, and the honest position is to say so rather than to invent a derivation for it. This is worth knowing precisely because Rahu Kaal is the most widely observed of the three. The one everybody checks is the one with the least structure behind it. ## The ninety-minute mistake An eighth of the daylight is only 90 minutes if the daylight is exactly twelve hours, which happens twice a year. The rest of the time it is something else. Measured at Delhi through 2026, the daylight span ran from about 618 minutes in late December to about 835 in mid-June. One eighth of that is 77 minutes at the short end and 104 at the long end. So a Rahu Kaal window in June is nearly half an hour longer than the same window in December, and a fixed 90-minute block is wrong by up to 14 minutes in either direction. It moves as well as stretching. Sunrise at Delhi shifts by more than an hour across the year, and since all eight parts are measured from sunrise, the whole sequence slides with it. Anyone using a printed table from a different month, or a different city, is looking at the wrong window. Latitude makes this worse rather than better. The further from the equator, the larger the seasonal swing in daylight, so a table computed for Chennai does not transfer to Delhi and neither transfers to London. ## Working out today's window Three numbers and one subtraction. Take 5 August 2026 at Delhi. Sunrise 05:45:50, sunset 19:08:12. The daylight span is 13 hours 22 minutes 22 seconds, which is 802.4 minutes, so each eighth is 100.3 minutes. It was a Wednesday, and Wednesday takes part 5. Part 5 begins after four complete parts have passed, so add 4 times 100.3 minutes to sunrise: 401.2 minutes, or 6 hours 41 minutes. That puts the start at 12:27, and the window closes 100 minutes later at 14:07. Which is what the calculator returns for that date: 12:27:01 to 14:07:19. The arithmetic is genuinely this simple, and doing it once makes clear why the answer cannot be a constant. ## Watching it walk through the week Fix the daylight at a round twelve hours, sunrise 06:00 and sunset 18:00, so each part is exactly 90 minutes. Now the whole week lines up and the shape of the table becomes visible: - Monday, part 2: 07:30 to 09:00 - Saturday, part 3: 09:00 to 10:30 - Friday, part 4: 10:30 to 12:00 - Wednesday, part 5: 12:00 to 13:30 - Thursday, part 6: 13:30 to 15:00 - Tuesday, part 7: 15:00 to 16:30 - Sunday, part 8: 16:30 to 18:00 Read as clock times the practical shape is clear enough to remember without the part numbers. Monday's window is early, before most things get going. Wednesday's sits squarely over lunch. Tuesday's and Sunday's are late afternoon, which is why those two days are the ones people most often find their plans colliding with it. And no part 1 appears anywhere, so the hour and a half straight after sunrise is never Rahu Kaal on any day of the week. Two cautions about that list. Real daylight is almost never twelve hours, so treat those times as the pattern rather than the answer. And they shift with location as well as season. Sunrise on the same date differs by around forty minutes between Delhi and Kolkata even though both keep the same clock, so a table printed for one city is simply wrong in the other. ## What the window is actually for The traditional restriction is narrow: avoid *beginning* things during Rahu Kaal. Journeys, purchases, signings, ceremonies, anything with a definite start that you want to prosper. It is not a prohibition on continuing something already under way, and it has never been a bar on ordinary living. A meeting that started before the window runs through it. Work in progress continues. The rule attaches to the moment of commencement, and reading it more broadly than that turns an hour and a half of every day into dead time for no textual reason. Two exceptions are widely accepted. Anything already begun is exempt, as above. And observances directed at Rahu, or remedial measures concerning it, are held to be appropriate precisely then, on the logic that the hour belongs to the thing being addressed. Which of those measures suit you is a question about your own chart rather than the clock, and starts from [Rahu in different houses](https://mahadasha.com/rahu-in-different-houses) . A third point comes up often enough to answer. There is a common belief that the Saturday window is the most severe of the seven. No classical source distinguishes them by weekday, and the eighth-part rule treats all seven identically, so treat that as folklore rather than doctrine. It is also worth keeping the window in proportion against the rest of the day. One eighth of the daylight is one eighth. Two more eighth-parts are spoken for by [Yamaganda Kaal](https://mahadasha.com/yamaganda-kaal) and [Gulika Kaal](https://mahadasha.com/gulika-kaal) , and the eight [Choghadiya muhurat](https://mahadasha.com/choghadiya-muhurat) slots overlap all of them on a different footing. Stack every restriction and almost nothing survives, which is why practitioners weigh them rather than applying them all at once. ## Frequently asked questions ### How is Rahu Kaal timing calculated? Divide the time between sunrise and sunset into eight equal parts, then take the part fixed by the weekday: 8th on Sunday, 2nd Monday, 7th Tuesday, 5th Wednesday, 6th Thursday, 4th Friday, 3rd Saturday. ### Is Rahu Kaal always 90 minutes? No. It is one eighth of the daylight, which at Delhi runs from about 77 minutes in December to about 104 in June. Ninety is only right around the equinoxes. ### Is there a Rahu Kaal at night? The classical window covers daylight only, since it is defined on the sunrise to sunset span. Some modern tables extend an equivalent division across the night, but that is an extension rather than the traditional rule. ### Does Rahu Kaal affect something already in progress? No. The restriction applies to beginnings. A journey underway, a meeting already running or work already started are not held to be affected. Get the exact window for your date and city from the [panchang calculator](https://mahadasha.com/panchang-calculator) , which computes it from your own sunrise rather than a table. For the weekday that determines it, see [vara in panchang](https://mahadasha.com/vara-in-panchang) , and for the wider picture, [what is panchang](https://mahadasha.com/what-is-panchang) .