Karva Chauth 2026 Moonrise Time City Wise: Full List for 29 October

2026-08-26

Karva Chauth 2026 falls on Thursday, 29 October. Delhi moonrise is 8:11 PM, engine-measured. Here is an honest city-wise list for 27 Indian cities — every non-Delhi time clearly marked as an estimate, with the longitude and latitude rule shown so you can check it yourself.

Karva Chauth in 2026 falls on Thursday, 29 October, and in Delhi the Moon rises at 8:11 PM. Nearly every search about this festival is really about that second number. Not the vidhi, not the katha, but the exact minute at which someone who has not touched water since before dawn can raise the chhalni and end the fast.

Delhi is given precisely below, because Delhi is what our panchang engine computes. Every other city is an estimate, worked out from Delhi by a rule we show in full. We keep the two apart, because a moonrise time is only worth having if you know how far to trust it.

The date, read straight off the panchang

Karva Chauth is kept on Chaturthi of the Krishna Paksha in Kartika. For 2026 the engine records, for Delhi:

• Krishna Chaturthi begins — 1:07 AM, Thursday 29 October 2026
• Krishna Chaturthi ends — 10:10 PM, the same night
• Nakshatra — Rohini, fourth pada; Yoga — Parigha
• Sunrise — 6:31 AM; sunset — 5:37 PM
• Moonrise — 8:11 PM
• Rahu kaal — 1:27 PM to 2:51 PM

Chaturthi opens and closes inside the same calendar day, so 2026 brings none of the two-date argument this festival attracts in other years. There is one date and it is 29 October. Ahoi Ashtami, kept by many of the same households, follows on Sunday, 1 November 2026. If the tithi machinery is unfamiliar, we have set it out on the tithi page.

Why Delhi is the anchor and not the answer

Newspapers print "moonrise 8:11 PM" as though the Moon ran to a national timetable. It does not. Moonrise is a purely local event: it happens when the Moon clears your horizon. Two things separate you from Delhi. The first is longitude — India keeps one clock but spans nearly thirty degrees of sky, and since the Earth turns fifteen degrees an hour, a town one degree east of you meets the Moon four minutes sooner. The second is latitude, which matters more on this particular night than it usually does, and which is the thing most city lists quietly get wrong.

City-wise moonrise for Karva Chauth 2026

All times are IST, for the evening of Thursday, 29 October 2026.

How to read this table: only the Delhi row is engine-measured. All twenty-six other times are estimates we computed from the Delhi value using the two corrections printed in the same row. They are not engine output. Expect them within about five minutes of the true local time, with a little more slack in the far south. Sunrise, sunset and moonrise all differ by city, so treat this as a planning list and confirm with your local panchang on the day.

The rule: four minutes per degree of longitude

Subtract your city's longitude from Delhi's 77.21°E and multiply the difference by four. A positive result is minutes to be added — you are west of Delhi, and the Moon reaches you later. A negative result is minutes to be subtracted — you are east, and you see it first. That is why Guwahati ends its fast almost an hour and a half before Mumbai does, on the same night, by the same clock. Nothing has gone wrong with anybody's panchang; the country is simply wide, and IST is a single line drawn through it at 82.5°E.

Ten cities, worked step by step

Longitude step first, then the latitude correction explained below.

1. Kolkata — 88.36°E is 11.15° east of Delhi. 11.15 × 4 = 45 minutes earlier, giving 7:26 PM. Kolkata lies further south, which pushes it back about 12 minutes: 7:38 PM.
2. Mumbai — 72.88°E is 4.33° west: 17 minutes later, 8:28 PM; latitude adds 18: 8:46 PM.
3. Chennai — 80.27°E is 3.06° east, so 12 minutes earlier at 7:59 PM. But Chennai sits far south, and latitude gives back about 28 minutes: 8:27 PM.
4. Ahmedabad — 72.57°E is 4.64° west, so 19 minutes later at 8:30 PM; latitude adds 11: 8:41 PM.
5. Lucknow — 80.95°E is 3.74° east: 15 minutes earlier, 7:56 PM; latitude adds 4: 8:00 PM.
6. Jaipur — 75.79°E is 1.42° west: 6 minutes later, 8:17 PM; latitude adds 3: 8:20 PM.
7. Bhopal — 77.41°E is almost Delhi's own meridian: 1 minute earlier, 8:10 PM; latitude adds 10: 8:20 PM.
8. Pune — 73.86°E is 3.35° west: 13 minutes later, 8:24 PM; latitude adds 19: 8:43 PM.
9. Patna — 85.14°E is 7.93° east: 32 minutes earlier, 7:39 PM; latitude adds 6: 7:45 PM.
10. Chandigarh — 76.78°E is 0.43° west, worth 2 minutes later at 8:13 PM; being further north, latitude subtracts 4: 8:09 PM.

Why the south waits longer than longitude alone predicts

Look at Chennai. Pure longitude says its Moon should arrive twelve minutes before Delhi's. In fact Chennai waits about sixteen minutes longer than Delhi. Bengaluru and Bhopal sit on nearly the same meridian, yet Bengaluru's Moon is seventeen minutes behind Bhopal's.

The reason is that on 29 October 2026 the Moon stands in Rohini, well north of the celestial equator. A body with northern declination rises early and sets late for northern observers, and the effect reverses as you travel south. It is the same geometry that gives north India its long June evenings. Because the Moon is near its northern extreme that night, latitude is doing real work — a little over half an hour between Delhi and Kochi — and any city list built on longitude alone will run the southern cities ten to thirty minutes early. Both corrections are applied above.

The Chaturthi window, and what 10:10 PM means

Chaturthi ends at 10:10 PM on 29 October, and the arghya to Chandra is meant to fall inside the tithi. Delhi's Moon rises at 8:11 PM, leaving a margin of about two hours. Even Kochi, the latest city on our list at roughly 8:48 PM, has more than eighty minutes. Nobody is squeezed this year.

One practical caution. Moonrise is not the moment the Moon becomes visible; it is the moment its upper edge clears a mathematically flat horizon. Behind towers or haze the Moon may take another fifteen to twenty-five minutes to actually appear. Set the thali for the listed time and expect to wait a little.

What the shastra says about the Moon, and what it does not

The vrat literature frames Karva Chauth as a sankalpa taken for the husband's long life, completed by offering arghya to Chandra and then receiving water from his hands. That much is textual. Beyond it, a good deal of what circulates is custom rather than scripture, and we would rather say so than fill the gap.

The chhalni — viewing the Moon, then the husband, through a sieve — is a widespread and genuinely old practice, but it is regional custom, not a prescribed step in the classical texts. Nor do those texts explain why the Moon, rather than any other body, receives the arghya on this tithi. There is no scriptural reasoning we can point to, and there is no medical or "scientific benefit" of fasting until moonrise that we are willing to manufacture. The vrat is kept because it is kept, with care, and that is a sufficient account of it.

Using this list on the night

Take the nearest city's time as your target, not your guarantee. If your town lies between two entries, interpolate by longitude: every degree east is four minutes off the clock. Begin the puja about an hour before the listed moonrise so the arghya is ready when the Moon is. For the full ritual sequence, sargi timings and sankalpa, see our Karva Chauth 2026 date and vrat vidhi guide. Kartika stays busy afterwards — Diwali 2026 follows within a fortnight, and the daily tithi, sunrise and rahu kaal for any date between are on our panchang.