About festcountdown
What This Site Does
festcountdown answers two questions fast: when is the festival, and what time should the puja actually start? Every festival gets a live countdown to its real muhurat window — not just to midnight on the day — paired with a calculator that works out sunrise, sunset, Pradosh Kaal and the full Choghadiya table for your own city.Diwali 2026 andRaksha Bandhan (Rakhi) 2026 are live now, with more festivals to follow once these two are solid.
Why We Built It
Searching "diwali 2026" or "raksha bandhan 2026" mostly surfaces two kinds of site: astrology platforms where the timing you came for sits three clicks deep behind kundli upsells, or global holiday calendars that list a date with no timing at all and a decade-old interface. Neither is built for someone who just wants the date, the timing, and enough real explanation to trust the answer. festcountdown is the tool-first alternative — fast on a mid-range phone over a slow connection, and free of clutter.
How We Verify Dates and Timings
Festival dates are verified against Drik Ganit panchang sources each year rather than copied forward from a previous edition — which matters more than it sounds, because Diwali is a lunar date that moves by weeks annually, and we have seen competing sites publish two contradictory Diwali 2026 dates on two pages of the same website.
The calculator isn't scraped from anywhere either. Sunrise and sunset come from the NOAA solar position algorithm computed for each city's coordinates, with time zones and daylight saving handled by your browser's own database. Choghadiya divides day and night into eight equal parts each, with the sequence set by the weekday; Pradosh Kaal runs from sunset to one-fifth of the way through the night. All of it is covered by automated tests that check our output against published panchang tables for several cities and dates — so when we change the code, a wrong number fails the build rather than reaching you.
What We Won't Do
We won't invent a number to fill a gap. Some windows — lagna-based muhurat such as Vrishabha Kaal — need a sidereal ascendant calculation that we can't do reliably for every city, so we publish the New Delhi reference and say so on the page instead of quietly presenting it as local. Where a festival has no single calculated authority at all, we describe the custom honestly rather than dressing up a guess as a fact. A timing you can trust is worth more than a timing that looks precise.
What Makes It Different
No astrology upsells, no kundli forms, no wall of ads before you reach the countdown, and no page reload when you change city. Just the date, the timing, and the context to understand both — plus practical supporting pages likewishes andgift guides for the parts of a festival that aren't about calculation at all.
Corrections
If a date or muhurat on this site looks wrong to you, please tell us — especially if your family follows a regional panchang tradition that differs from what we've published. We'd far rather fix an error than defend it.Get in touch, or read ourterms for the full accuracy note.