Earlier this year, we published a blog post with a graphical ephemeris and a list of rāśi and nakṣatra transits for 2016. It is December already and with New Year approaching, it is time to publish an update for the upcoming 2017.

As a nice complement to this post, the retrograde motion calendar for years 2016 to 2020 we published earlier is still valid and covers 2017 as well. Also, remember that if you have Chakra Darshana on your Android phone or tablet, it can automatically notify you about transits and direction changes as they happen.

Continuing the already established format for such posts, the following picture shows the graphical ephemeris for 2017 with crossing points allowing to visually identify rāśi transits and conjunctions (click on the image for viewing the chart at a larger scale):

Rāśi transit data is provided below in tabular form. In order to keep the table sufficiently narrow for the Web page format, it is organized as follows. Rows are sorted by date and time in UTC, giving a chronological sequence of events. Transits for Candra are omitted, because that would make the table very long. Transits for Sūrya, Maṅgala, Budha, and Śukra are listed in separate columns, because they transit often and having a separate column makes it easy to visually filter transits for that particular graha. Transits for Guru, Śani, Rāhu, and Ketu are listed in a single combined column on the right, because they only transit rarely:

The following table, organized by the same principle, gives nakṣatra transit data:

There exist many schemes for Sanskrit transliteration. For instance, there is a Harvard-Kyoto scheme, which is easier to type, but harder to read, and there is an International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which is harder to type, but easier to read. However, these schemes only provide transliteration methods using the Latin script (either plain Latin characters or Latin characters with diacritics) and do not cover transliteration into other scripts like Cyrillic. The task of Cyrillic transliteration is not new and, in this blog post, we explore the available methods of Sanskrit transliteration into Russian - those used in practice and the one chosen for Chakra Darshana and our online Sanskrit transliteration tool.

Nowadays, Sanskrit transliteration into multiple languages is most prominently featured in the books published by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, which is the world’s largest publisher of classic Vaiṣṇava texts and contemporary works on bhakti yoga, most notably those by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder-ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). For classic Sanskrit texts, these books usually contain the original Sanskrit verse in Devanagari, a transliteration of the verse, a word for word translation, a literary translation, and a purport. In English books, the transliteration scheme is mostly identical with IAST, except that ṁ (with dot above) is used instead of ṃ (with dot below).

In Russian books, the transliteration scheme is similar and is based on the same general principle. It augments the basic Russian characters with the same diacritical marks (except that plain ш is used for ṣ), prettifying some cases to be consistent with the general rules of the Russian language, like transliterating eṣaḥ (he) as эшах̣ instead of ешах̣.

This gives the following transliteration table (if it does not render properly, this might be a font issue, read below; also, for the purposes of this blog post, the table uses м̣ instead of м̇, because currently Chakra Darshana follows IAST, but that may change in the future; finally, compare with English table):

So far it looks similar to and just as easy as with English, but there is a problem. Namely, the Unicode computing industry standard, which is meant to provide characters from most of the world’s writing systems, contains characters with diacritics that are needed for the English version of IAST, but it does not have most of the characters needed for the Russian version. In fact, in only has two (see the Cyrillic character range): Ӣ (U+04E2) and ӣ (U+04E3), and Ӯ (U+04EE) and ӯ (U+04EF). Other characters do not have a direct representation in Unicode, which means that they are not included into general-purpose fonts.

There are two ways to approach this problem. The first approach is to design a custom font with custom code points that includes the necessary glyphs. For instance, the online Bhaktivedanta VedaBase uses exactly this approach. Let’s take Bhagavad-gītā 9.25 as an example:

Looking at the character codes used in this verse, we will see that it uses U+04EF for ӯ (as expected), U+F101 for а̄, and U+F117 for р̣̄. If we ask the unicode program what these code points correspond to, it will confirm that only the first of them belongs to Unicode:

The Bhaktivedanta VedaBase in the verse above uses a Gaura Times font. Inspecting it with gucharmap (GNOME Character Map) and gnome-font-viewer confirms that is has custom glyphs designed specifically for the purpose:

For the purposes of Chakra Darshana, which includes a Russian translation since version 1.5.0, we felt that designing a custom font and bundling it with the application would be a bit too much at this point. Fortunately, there exists a second approach to solving the problem using combining diacritical marks.

Combining diacritical marks allow to take a base character and add some diacritics to it. For instance, the character а̄ would be represented as the base character а (U+0430), immediately followed by a combining macron (U+0304). This way, а̄ actually consists of two characters and four bytes in total. Some characters, like р̣̄ in the verse, need two combining marks: the base character р (U+0440), the combining dot below (U+0323), and the combining macron (U+0304). The resulting р̣̄ thus consists of three characters and six bytes.

This is a nice universal solution, because it does not require a custom font and may work with any font. At the same time, there is no guarantee that it will render in a pretty way with any given font and a rendering engine. Currently, it seems to work sufficiently well in practice.

Now that we understand the theory, we need a practical way to type these characters. As always, Vim comes to the rescue! Unlike the English transliteration covered earlier, we cannot use digraphs here, because digraphs map to a single character only, but Vim fully supports combining characters and we can use insert mode mappings to make the editing process similar to that of English.

Here is the updated sanskrit.vim script that we use for development and it includes the necessary settings for both English and Russian transliteration:

" digraph A-  256 " Ā
" digraph a-  257 " ā
" digraph I-  298 " Ī
" digraph i-  299 " ī
" digraph U-  362 " Ū
" digraph u-  363 " ū
" digraph M. 7744 " Ṁ
" digraph m. 7745 " ṁ
" digraph N. 7748 " Ṅ
" digraph n. 7749 " ṅ
" digraph N?  209 " Ñ
" digraph n?  241 " ñ
" digraph S'  346 " Ś
" digraph s'  347 " ś

digraph R, 7770 " Ṛ
digraph r, 7771 " ṛ
digraph R- 7772 " Ṝ
digraph r- 7773 " ṝ
digraph L, 7734 " Ḷ
digraph l, 7735 " ḷ
digraph L- 7736 " Ḹ
digraph l- 7737 " ḹ
digraph M, 7746 " Ṃ
digraph m, 7747 " ṃ
digraph H, 7716 " Ḥ
digraph h, 7717 " ḥ
digraph T, 7788 " Ṭ
digraph t, 7789 " ṭ
digraph D, 7692 " Ḍ
digraph d, 7693 " ḍ
digraph N, 7750 " Ṇ
digraph n, 7751 " ṇ
digraph S, 7778 " Ṣ
digraph s, 7779 " ṣ

imap <C-k>А- А̄
imap <C-k>а- а̄
imap <C-k>И- Ӣ
imap <C-k>и- ӣ
imap <C-k>У- Ӯ
imap <C-k>у- ӯ
imap <C-k>Мю М̇
imap <C-k>мю м̇
imap <C-k>Ню Н̇
imap <C-k>ню н̇
imap <C-k>Н, Н̃
imap <C-k>н, н̃
imap <C-k>Шэ Ш́
imap <C-k>шэ ш́

imap <C-k>Рб Р̣
imap <C-k>рб р̣
imap <C-k>Р- Р̣̄
imap <C-k>р- р̣̄
imap <C-k>Лб Л̣
imap <C-k>лб л̣
imap <C-k>Л- Л̣̄
imap <C-k>л- л̣̄
imap <C-k>Мб М̣
imap <C-k>мб м̣
imap <C-k>Хб Х̣
imap <C-k>хб х̣
imap <C-k>Тб Т̣
imap <C-k>тб т̣
imap <C-k>Дб Д̣
imap <C-k>дб д̣
imap <C-k>Нб Н̣
imap <C-k>нб н̣

Russian mappings are designed so that they are similar to type as English digraphs, even if it is not immediately apparent from the Vim script above. For example, to obtain ṃ in English we use Ctrl + K m , and to obtain м̣ in Russian we use Ctrl + K м б, which is convenient, because English , and Russian б are the same keyboard key. Similarly, to obtain ś in English we use Ctrl + K s ' and to obtain ш́ in Russian we use Ctrl + K ш э, where English ' and Russian э are the same keyboard key.

Happy Vimming!

In response to our previous blog post on motion patterns over a long period of time, some readers have expressed their desire to have a similar chart, which would show the relative movement of grahas for the current year. The individual pattern charts for 20 years are good for understanding each graha’s motion, but the combined chart for one year is good for practical application. Therefore, this blog post shares the graphical ephemeris chart for 2016, as well as rāśi and nakṣatra transit calendar in tabular form. Note that with Chakra Darshana on your Android phone or tablet, you can receive transit and direction change notifications automatically. For a published retrograde motion calendar, please refer to the dedicated blog post.

The following picture shows the graphical ephemeris for 2016 with crossing points allowing to visually identify rāśi transits and conjunctions (click on the image for viewing the chart at a larger scale):

Rāśi transit data is provided below in tabular form. In order to keep the table sufficiently narrow for the Web page format, it is organized as follows. Rows are sorted by date and time in UTC, giving a chronological sequence of events. Transits for Candra are omitted, because that would make the table very long. Transits for Sūrya, Maṅgala, Budha, and Śukra are listed in separate columns, because they transit often and having a separate column makes it easy to visually filter transits for that particular graha. Transits for Guru, Śani, Rāhu, and Ketu are listed in a single combined column on the right, because they only transit rarely:

The following table, organized by the same principle, gives nakṣatra transit data:

We have recently published a blog post with retrograde motion calendar for the next five years. There was a table giving dates when grahas become retrograde and direct again. From that table, it might have been a bit hard to infer whether there is any pattern to how they change direction. In this blog post, we illustrate each graha’s motion for the next twenty years in graphical form, making it easy to see that each graha has a rather regular and unique motion pattern. This blog post thus serves as a nice complement to the calendar post and retrograde motion statistics provided therein.

It was recently the case from April 28, 2016 to May 9, 2016 that four grahas were simultaneously retrograde, in addition to the always retrograde Rāhu and Ketu, making it a total of six grahas in retrogression. In upcoming years, a similar situation will occur in April 2017 and June 2020, where four grahas will be retrograde again. This blog post gives a list of all direction changes from 2016 to 2020, shares some interesting statistics about retrograde motion, and gives the dates when all five grahas (for a total of seven!) will be retrograde later in this century.

As the Moon moves around the Earth, it has its orbit slightly inclined (about 5°) to the ecliptic, where the Earth moves around the Sun. Since the orbit of the Moon is slightly inclined, there exist two points where it crosses the ecliptic plane. These points are called lunar nodes. The ascending node is where the Moon crosses the ecliptic moving from South to North and the descending node is where the Moon crosses the ecliptic moving in the opposite direction from North to South. The Moon spends about half of its time below the ecliptic and half of its time above, usually crossing each node once a month (image courtesy of Wikipedia):

One of the great features of Chakra Darshana is that it tries to provide authentic spelling of all Sanskrit terms that appear in the user interface. Fortunately, Vim - the editor that we use for development - makes it very easy to type Sanskrit transliteration. In this blog post, we explore what is available for Sanskrit in Vim out of the box and share what needs to be customized in order to make Sanskrit editing a joyful experience.