Three new features have been added in this release: two of them provide improvements for working with muhūrta by adding two new cell types, “Vāra lagnas” and “Kāla horās”, and another adds a missing cara kāraka scheme with 7 grahas.
The new cell types can be found in “Calendar and muhūrta” section:
The first of these cell types that we will cover, “Vāra lagnas”, shows starting times for all lagnas during the current vāra (i.e., from sunrise to sunrise). Here is how it looks in different chart styles:
These calculations are useful, for instance, if you are doing planning for the day and you need specific lagnas for certain actions, or you need to avoid specific lagnas and graha positions in certain bhāvas. For instance, in the example above, the lagna at sunrise is Mīna. In South Indian chart on the left, it can be easily identified, because it is the first lagna without a star, which means the next calendar day. In North Indian chart on the right, the first lagna for the vāra is located in the 1st bhāva.
Thus, the Mīna lagna is in effect from 06:23 to 07:01. Since the rāśi of lagna and Sūrya usually coincide at sunrise (sometimes they may be different, depending on the definition of sunrise), it may be possible to infer the position of Sūrya just from this chart alone, although it will also be seen in “Rāśi (D-1)” cell. In any case, you may wish to avoid the time from 14:48 to 17:52 for dealing with management, because Sūrya will be in 8th bhāva at that time, assuming Sūrya does not transit during the day. This is a nice example of how this cell type can be used practically.
The concept and the original idea behind this cell type belongs to Ainars Gaidis, the author of the most beautiful and most detailed printed pañcāṅga and personal muhūrta calendars in Latvia (see panchanga.lv).
Please note that these lagna calculations are a bit computationally intensive, so if you use this cell type, you may notice a slight delay compared to older versions before the horoscope is fully computed.
Also, if you are viewing this cell before sunrise (for instance, it is currently 05:00 in the morning and the sunrise is at 06:24), the lagna times will mostly be for the previous calendar day. This may not be very convenient if you intend to plan for today, but lagna times do not change much between successive days (on the order of 4 minutes), so this approximation may be good enough.
The second new cell type is “Kāla horās”. It is similar to “Vāra lagnas” and shows starting times for all kāla horās during the current vāra (in previous versions, only the current kāla horā was shown in “Daily muhūrta” cell type):
We have also added a research article on kāla horā calculations on the website.
Finally, the third new feature is the cara kāraka scheme with 7 grahas without pitṛ kāraka. This scheme is needed by the students of K. N. Rao. The previous versions of Chakra Darshana would only compute cara kārakas in a scheme with 8 grahas. Now, both schemes are shown simultaneously side by side in “Cara kārakas” cell type:
These calculations are also supplemented by a research article on cara kārakas in the documentation section. Thanks to Natalja Zvigelska, the author of navagraha.lv, for her valuable help in conducting this research!