Acknowledgements

Credits & Acknowledgements

This site is built on other people's work as well as our own. This page records what we use, who made it, and under what terms.

The text, design, Panchāṅgam engine, festival calendar and prasādam reference on SaivaPriest.com are the original work of Sri Kumar Naganathan Gurukkal. Factual reference material — dates, temple offering names, historical terminology — is compiled from the sources cited on the relevant pages and is not claimed as ours.

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Llama is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc., used here solely to satisfy the attribution requirement of the Llama 3.2 Community License. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Meta.

Answers from the assistant are generated automatically and can be incomplete or wrong. It is not Sri Kumar Gurukkal and does not speak for him. Please confirm ritual details and the muhūrtham with him directly.

WebLLM

The model runs in your browser through WebLLM (@mlc-ai/web-llm 0.2.84, loaded as a pinned module from the jsDelivr CDN by way of esm.run), Copyright © the MLC-AI authors, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The model identifier requested is Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-q4f16_1-MLC. WebLLM depends on loglevel, Copyright © 2013 Tim Perry, MIT licensed.

Apache-2.0 asks that a project's NOTICE file be reproduced by anyone who redistributes it. We checked on 17 August 2026: the WebLLM repository publishes no NOTICE file, and none ships in the released package, so there is nothing of that kind to reproduce here.

Typefaces

Six typefaces are used, all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. They are served by Google Fonts; this site does not redistribute the font files.

Three further Noto families — Noto Sans Telugu, Noto Sans Kannada and Noto Sans Malayalam — are named in the stylesheets as fallbacks for those scripts. They are not fetched from Google Fonts or from us, and they appear only if your own device already has them. They are also the work of the Noto Project Authors under the same licence.

Astronomical calculations

The Panchāṅgam engine computes solar and lunar positions using the abridged periodic-term series published in Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (Willmann-Bell), chapter 25 (the lower-accuracy solar position) and chapter 47 (lunar position, Tables 47.A and 47.B). Our code shortens those tables further, keeping the 59 largest terms of the lunar longitude sum and the 30 largest of the latitude sum. Meeus's tables are themselves an abridgement of the ELP-2000/82 lunar theory of M. Chapront-Touzé and J. Chapront. The implementation in assets/js/panch.js is our own work; the periodic terms are reproduced as astronomical data. With gratitude to Jean Meeus, whose book made this kind of calculation possible for everyone.

The ayanāṃśa is a linear approximation of the published Lahiri (Chitrapakṣa) value. See the Panchāṅgam methodology page for the full method and its accuracy limits.

Since 2026-08-31 the engine is checked, on every build, against a second and independent implementation: the NOAA solar position algorithm, written out separately in tools/verify_panchangam.js from the published equations rather than shared with panch.js. Sunrise and sunset agree to better than a tenth of a minute across nine dates and locations. The Moon is checked against physical constraints — the synodic and sidereal periods, and the physically derived bounds on tithi length — rather than against a second copy of the same series, which would prove nothing. No commercial Panchāṅgam website is consulted, scraped or compared against, and none ever has been.

The muhūrtham ruleset

The interpretation layer — which periods are set aside, which tithis are avoided for beginning something, how Guḷika Kālam is treated — is not derived from any published almanac, book or website. It is held in assets/data/tradition-profile.js, and every active rule in it was extracted from material this site already publishes with its basis stated: the methodology page, this site’s own ceremony catalogue, and the day-quality classification that has been on the homepage since launch. Each rule records where it came from and whether Sri Kumar Gurukkal has reviewed it.

Seven further elements of traditional muhūrtham practice — Tārā Bala, Chandra Bala, lagna analysis, eclipse and Saṅkrānti restrictions, planetary combustion, and ceremony-specific tithi and nakṣatra tables — are recorded as proposed and inactive. They are deliberately not drafted. Copying such a table from another almanac would be both an invention of this site’s tradition and, quite possibly, someone else’s intellectual property. The muhūrtham page names every one of them as not evaluated.

Calendar sources

Festival and observance dates are compiled for the Fremont / Bay Area anchor and checked against Northern-California Panchāṅgam references. Every date carries an internal validation grade. Open a date on the calendar and it tells you in plain words how that date was arrived at — validated against a Northern-California Panchāṅgam source, derived for the Fremont anchor from tithi and nakṣatra rules, or regional and organiser-dependent, in which case the entry also asks you to check with your temple. Dates are facts, not anyone's property, but we are glad to say that published almanacs made the checking possible. Sources for the prasādam reference are listed on that page.

Downloadable companions

Two documents can be downloaded from the ceremony guides. Both are original work written for this site, and both carry their own copyright notice and permitted-use statement on the first page. They may be printed and shared freely for personal and family devotional use; they may not be republished, sold or reproduced elsewhere without written permission.

Sri Satyanarayana Katha — Family English Retelling is a retelling, deliberately not a word-for-word translation and not a recitation text. It follows the traditional five-chapter narrative in newly written English prose. In preparing it we consulted the Louisiana Folklife Program’s published English presentation of the Katha alongside other references. That page is copyrighted; we credit it as a source consulted and reproduce none of its text.

Ganapathy Homam — Scholar-Priest Companion is a work of family education, not a priest’s ritual manual: it publishes no mantra, count, nyāsa or homa-dravya formula. It names its sources rather than paraphrasing them anonymously, and its suggested reading includes Greg Bailey’s translations of the Gaṇeśa Purāṇa, Alice Getty’s iconographic monograph, and Paul B. Courtright’s Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings. The last of these is a modern academic study whose interpretive claims have been widely contested, particularly within Hindu communities; the companion lists it as scholarship to be read critically and in context, not as an account of the tradition as devotees hold it.

Both documents were reviewed and approved for publication by Sri Kumar Naganathan Gurukkal on 20 August 2026.

Icons

The square speech-bubble icon on the home page is message-square from Feather Icons, Copyright © 2013–2023 Cole Bemis, MIT licensed. The other small line icons on the site were drawn for it in the same idiom. WhatsApp is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc.

Scheduling and measurement

Booking is handled by Cal.com, an independent scheduling service — see our privacy page. Where enabled and consented to, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity are used for measurement; see our cookies page.

Temples named on this site

Temple names are used descriptively, to say where an offering comes from. SaivaPriest.com is an independent reference and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any temple or its administering body. Temple names and marks belong to their institutions.

Corrections

If we have used your work and got the credit wrong, or missed it, please write to gurukkalkumar@gmail.com and we will fix it.

Last reviewed: 20 August 2026