Golden Hour, Sunrise and Sunset Calculator
See golden hour, blue hour, sunrise, sunset and twilight times for your location or any place in the world.
Any date, any place, worked out in your browser
See golden hour, blue hour, sunrise, sunset and twilight times for your location or any place in the world.
Any date, any place, worked out in your browser
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This is a golden hour calculator, a sunrise sunset calculator and a blue hour calculator on one page. Search for a city in the place box, tap the locate button inside it to use your own location, or type a latitude and longitude under More options, pick the day with the arrows, and the times appear: what the sun does next and how long until it does, sunrise and sunset over a bar of the whole day, golden hour and blue hour for both morning and evening, and how long the day lasts.
The bar in the middle is that whole day, midnight to midnight, coloured by the light: pale blue for daylight, amber for golden hour, a narrow strip of blue for blue hour, and darker and darker steps of night for nautical twilight, astronomical twilight and full dark. A photographer planning a shoot can see the shape of the light in one look: when the good light comes, how long it lasts, and where the day is right now.
Everything is worked out in the browser. Your location is never sent anywhere.
Golden hour, sometimes called magic hour, is the stretch when the sun sits low enough for warm, soft, directional light. Blue hour is the cooler stretch after the sun has gone but the sky still carries light, which is when city lights and the sky balance for the same exposure.
Every site picks slightly different limits, so here are the ones used here. Golden hour runs from 6 degrees above the horizon down to 4 degrees below it, which means it holds sunrise and sunset inside it rather than stopping at them. Blue hour runs from 4 degrees below to 6 degrees below. Both are given twice, once for the morning and once for the evening.
Near the equator golden hour can be under half an hour, while a summer evening in Scotland stretches it past ninety minutes. That is why the length is worth checking for the place you are actually standing in rather than taking an hour as read.
The sunrise and sunset times are the moment the top edge of the sun crosses the horizon, including the refraction that lifts it into view slightly before it is geometrically there, which is the convention almanacs use.
Solar noon is the moment the sun is highest, halfway through the light part of the bar, and it is rarely 12:00 on the clock: your longitude inside the time zone and the equation of time can push it by more than half an hour. How high the sun climbs then is what decides how hard midday shadows are going to be. In the tropics it can reach 90 degrees, with the sun directly overhead and no shadow at all.
Day length, also called daylight duration or daylength, is the span between sunrise and sundown, and it is the hours of sunlight you get to work with that day. Change the date by a day or two and watch it move: near the equinoxes it shifts around four minutes a day at mid latitudes, while near the solstices it slows to seconds, which is where the word solstice comes from.
Twilight is graded by how far the sun is below the horizon, and each grade answers a different practical question.
Civil twilight ends 6 degrees below the horizon. Until then you can still read outside and drive without headlights, and it is the limit most legal definitions of daylight use. Nautical twilight runs to 12 degrees below, the point where the horizon at sea becomes too faint to take a star sight against. Astronomical twilight runs to 18 degrees below, after which the sky is as dark as it is going to get, which is when deep sky photography and faint object observing can start.
The day bar shows all three as the steps that darken on either side of blue hour, so you can read dawn and dusk off the hours under it without a table of numbers. Inside the polar circles some of those steps never come, and that is not an error: for part of the year the sun never gets 18 degrees down, so astronomical night simply does not happen.
Times are always shown on the clock of the place you picked, not yours. Choose Reykjavik from Australia and you get Icelandic time, with that country's daylight saving handled for the date you chose. The place box always shows that clock's offset from UTC, and More options names the time zone itself, so there is never a doubt about which clock a time belongs to.
Pick a city and the zone comes with it. Use the locate button and your device's own time zone is used, which is exact. Type raw coordinates and the page picks the nearest city's zone as its best guess and says so, which can be wrong within a few hundred kilometres of a zone border.
Above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle the sun can stay up or stay down for days. Instead of blank rows the page says which it is: the sun never sets, or it never rises, with the day length set accordingly.
A location is personal in a way an image size is not. Nothing here leaves your device: the astronomy runs in JavaScript on your own machine, the city list ships with the page, and when you use the locate button the coordinates go from the browser into the calculation and nowhere else. There is no lookup service behind this page, no API key, and no request carrying your position to a server. The last place you looked at is remembered in your own browser so the page opens where you left it, and clearing your browser data clears that too.
Tap the locate button inside the place box and the page fills in your coordinates and your own time zone, then reads out the morning and evening golden hour for today. The line at the top counts down to the next event, so it tells you that golden hour starts in two hours and ten minutes as well as when it starts.
It depends on your latitude and the time of year, which is exactly why a calculator is worth using. Close to the equator the sun drops almost vertically and golden hour can be twenty five minutes. In summer at high latitudes the sun slides along the horizon and it can last two hours or more.
Golden hour is warm light with the sun just above or just below the horizon. Blue hour comes after it in the evening, and before it in the morning, when the sun is between 4 and 6 degrees below the horizon and the light turns cool and even, with no direct sun at all.
Yes. Step with the arrows either side of the date, or tap the date to pick any day from the calendar, and everything recalculates, including that place's daylight saving rules for that date. Planning a shoot for a specific evening months ahead works the same as checking today.
The page works out the sun's height above the horizon minute by minute for the whole day at your coordinates, then finds the exact moment it crosses each level: 0 degrees for the sunrise/sunset calculation, 6 degrees below for civil twilight, 12 for nautical and 18 for astronomical. Golden hour and blue hour are two more levels on the same curve. Doing it that way is also why the polar cases come out right: if the sun never reaches a level, there is no crossing to report.
They are computed with the standard astronomical solar position used by almanacs and checked against the US Naval Observatory's published tables, which they match to the printed minute on almost every test case. Times at the horizon can still shift by a minute or two in the real world, because hills, buildings and unusual air can raise or hide the horizon where you are standing.
No. The calculation runs in your browser and your coordinates stay in it. There is no geocoding request and no analytics call carrying your position anywhere.