The next 14 daysfrom · tap a day to open it
each column is a day · tap one to select it
Golden and blue hour per evening, in minutes
When the golden hour and the blue hour start and end at any place on Earth, for any day, with sunrise, sunset and all three twilights. Drag the sun through the day, see 14 days or the whole year, put it on a map, and save it to your calendar.
NOAA solar maths, calculated in your browser for any place and date.
Search a town, press Use my location, tap the Map, or type coordinates. The time zone and daylight saving of that place are set for you.
Today to start with. Use the arrows or ← → for the next day, or open the date field to plan a shoot or a trip.
The box on the left says what is on now or what starts next. Below it are the morning and evening golden hour and blue hour, sunrise, sunset and day length.
Drag along the day chart or press Play and the sky, the sun's height and its compass direction follow. 14 days, Year and Map show how it changes and where the sun will stand.
The Plan tab downloads a calendar file (.ics) or a spreadsheet (.csv) for 1 day up to a year. Copy link keeps the place and the day.
The name is a convention, not a measurement. Golden hour is the period when the sun sits between the horizon and about 6° above it, and how long that takes depends entirely on how steeply the sun climbs where you are standing.
| Place | Latitude | Evening golden hour, 21 June | Evening golden hour, 21 December |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 1° N | ~30 min | ~30 min |
| Cairo | 30° N | ~35 min | ~36 min |
| Brussels | 51° N | ~53 min | ~60 min |
| Reykjavík | 64° N | ~2 h | all day — the sun never climbs above 6° |
From the sun at 6° down to sunset, as this calculator measures it, ignoring terrain.
Near the equator the sun drops almost vertically and the window is only about half an hour — if you are shooting in the tropics, arriving "about an hour before sunset" means arriving half an hour too early and then missing the end of it. In an Icelandic summer the sun skims along so shallowly that golden hour runs for hours and merges into the next one.
It is the same light, in reverse, and it has three advantages that get overlooked. The air is at its clearest before the day's haze and traffic build up. Locations are empty. And morning golden hour improves as it runs, so a late arrival still works, where in the evening every minute of hesitation costs you the best of it.
The catch is that you have to be in position before it starts, in the dark, which is why the blue hour time on this page matters as much as the golden hour one: it tells you when there will be enough light to find your footing.
With the sun low, its light crosses far more atmosphere to reach you — at the horizon roughly forty times the path length it takes at noon. Air scatters short wavelengths much more strongly than long ones, so over that distance the blue is stripped out and what arrives is weighted towards red and orange. The colour temperature falls from about 5,500 K at midday to under 3,000 K.
The direction matters as much as the colour. Light arriving almost horizontally rakes across texture instead of flattening it, and the enormous scattering volume acts as a soft box, so shadows stay open. That combination — warm, directional, soft — is what no midday hour and no colour grade quite reproduces.
A sky panorama with the sun's path from east to west and a chart of the sun's height against the clock, with golden hour and blue hour as coloured bands. Drag to move the sun, or press Play.
The light of the next two weeks side by side: each column is a day, top to bottom is midnight to midnight, with a table of the times. Tap a day to open it.
All 365 days in one picture, the minutes of golden hour and blue hour through the seasons, the longest and shortest day, the equinoxes and the clock changes of that place.
A map of the place with wedges where the sun stands during golden hour and blue hour, the direction of sunrise and sunset, and a line that follows the sun as you move it.
Calendar and spreadsheet files for a day up to a year, with the moments you choose and an optional reminder.
Search any town, use your location, tap the map or type coordinates. Midnight sun and polar night are shown as such.
Every colour on the charts is the height of the sun at that moment. Yellow is golden hour, blue is blue hour, a soft rose between them is the horizon glow that the wide definition adds, then three darker blues for nautical twilight, astronomical twilight and night. Light-blue is full daylight. The key under each chart lists the angles for the definition you chose. The white lines on the 14-day and year charts are sunrise and sunset, and the dashed line is solar noon.
There is no official definition. Classic, the default, is the one used by most photography guides: golden hour lasts from sunrise or sunset until the sun is 6° above the horizon, and blue hour is the sun 4° to 6° below the horizon. Wide starts golden hour as soon as the sun is 4° below the horizon, which includes the pink glow just before sunrise and just after sunset, and stretches blue hour to the sun 4° to 8° below. Switch between them in the About tab. The choice is kept in the link and in this browser, so the times in a shared link match what you saw.
Take the evening golden hour figure this page gives for your date and place, and add fifteen to twenty minutes for setting up. That is the honest answer, and it is why a fixed rule fails: "an hour before sunset" is half an hour too early in Singapore and an hour too late in Reykjavík in June.
If you also want the blue hour that follows, plan to stay for roughly another half hour after sunset — the exact window is in the card above.
"Magic hour" is the film-industry term and is used more loosely: sometimes it means golden hour, sometimes golden and blue hour together, sometimes just the last minutes before dark. Golden hour is the one with a defined threshold — the sun below 6° — which is why this calculator uses it.
From sunrise until the sun reaches 6° above the horizon in the morning, and from 6° back down to sunset in the evening. The light is warm and directional because it is travelling through far more atmosphere, which scatters away the blue and leaves long, soft shadows.
It is only rarely an hour. Near the equator it is about half an hour; at 60° north in June it is about 80 minutes, and in a northern winter it can last all day. This page gives you the actual figure for your place and date instead of the name.
The stretch of civil twilight when the sun is between about −4° and −6°: after sunset the warm light has gone, but the sky still holds a deep, even blue rather than black. It is the window where building lights and a sky that still has colour in it balance out — the reason city skylines are shot then. Typically 10 to 20 minutes at mid-latitudes, under ten near the equator, and much longer in a high-latitude summer.
Yes. In the Plan tab choose how many days (1, 7, 30 or a whole year), which moments you want (morning or evening golden hour, morning or evening blue hour, sunrise, sunset) and whether to add a reminder 15 minutes before. Calendar (.ics) downloads a standard file that imports into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and anything else that reads the format. The events carry real start and end times, so a golden hour shows up as a block of the right length rather than a point. Spreadsheet (.csv) gives one row per day with every time, in the 24-hour clock of the place.
Within about three minutes at the worst, and usually within one. The page uses the NOAA solar position algorithm, the same maths behind the US National Weather Service's solar calculator. It was compared with the sunrise and sunset times of Open-Meteo, an independent service, for 368 events at 12 places on all continents, including days when the clocks change, Kathmandu with its 45-minute offset, Auckland and Kiritimati: the average difference was half a minute and the largest 3 minutes. Open-Meteo rounds to the minute, so part of that is rounding.
The rest is not in the arithmetic, it is in the atmosphere. Sunrise is defined as the moment the sun's upper edge appears, and how much the air bends the light on the way varies with temperature and pressure. On a cold, clear morning the sun can arrive a minute or two ahead of any published table. Nobody's calculator fixes that; it is weather, not maths.
Usually because you are not standing where it thinks you are. Weather apps snap you to a city centre or a whole time zone; move 30 km east and sunrise arrives about two minutes earlier. Search for your actual town here and the gap normally closes.
The other common cause is elevation and terrain. These times assume a flat, unobstructed horizon at sea level. In a valley the sun disappears behind a ridge long before it sets astronomically; on a mountain top or a high floor it lingers. Neither this tool nor any other that works from coordinates alone knows what your horizon looks like.
Solar noon is the moment the sun is highest — the real middle of the day, when a vertical stick casts its shortest shadow. Clock noon is a civil convention and drifts from it for two reasons.
First, time zones are wide. Everyone in a zone keeps the same clock, but the sun reaches each longitude in turn, so solar noon slides by four minutes for every degree of longitude. Second, the equation of time: the Earth's orbit is slightly elliptical and its axis is tilted, so the sun runs up to about 16 minutes fast or slow against the clock depending on the season. Add daylight saving and solar noon can land closer to 13:45 than to 12:00.
Without you having to think about it. The calculation is done in absolute time and only converted to a clock reading at the last step, using the full time-zone rules for the place you searched. Pick a date on the far side of a clock change and the times shown are the ones people there will actually read on the day.
They are three thresholds for how far the sun has sunk below the horizon, and each marks a real change in what you can do outside.
| Stage | Sun is | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Civil twilight | 0° to −6° | Enough light to read and work outdoors without a lamp. The brightest planets appear. This is the boundary most street lighting and headlight laws use. |
| Nautical twilight | −6° to −12° | The horizon is still faintly visible while stars are out — the window in which sailors could take a sextant reading against it. |
| Astronomical twilight | −12° to −18° | Dark to the eye, but the last scattered sunlight still fogs long-exposure photographs. Below −18° is true night. |
Dawn is when a twilight stage begins; sunrise is the single moment the sun's upper edge clears the horizon. So the sky at your latitude starts brightening at astronomical dawn, is properly usable by civil dawn, and only then does the sun itself appear. Dusk mirrors it in the evening. "Dawn" on its own almost always means civil dawn.
Because twilight length depends on the angle at which the sun crosses the horizon, not its speed. At the equator it drops almost straight down and passes through all 18° in a little over an hour — tropical nightfall really is abrupt. At higher latitudes it slides down at a shallow angle and takes far longer to get as far below.
Push far enough north in June and it never gets there at all. Above roughly 48.5° — which includes Paris, Vancouver and everything above them — there are weeks around midsummer with no astronomical twilight whatsoever. The sky never goes fully dark. That is what "white nights" means, and this page shows those events as absent rather than inventing a time for them.
The maths runs in the page, on your device. If you press Use my location, your coordinates are used in this tab and nowhere else, and the time zone is the one set on your device. There is deliberately no reverse lookup to turn them into a place name, because that would mean handing your exact position to a third party purely for a label.
Three kinds of request do leave your browser, and each is listed in the Privacy section further down: the text you type in the place search, the coordinates of a point you tap on the map or type in (to ask which time zone it is in), and the map pictures. Ignore the place search and the map and the page never talks to anything but the font and the page statistics.
Copy link in the Plan tab puts the place, coordinates, date, time zone and view into the URL, and Copy the times copies the day's golden hour, blue hour, sunrise and sunset as text with that link. Whoever opens the link sees precisely what you saw, in the time zone of the place rather than their own, so the times do not silently shift. The address bar keeps itself up to date as you change things, so bookmarking works too. Links made with the earlier version of this page, with lat, lon, place, date and tz, still open the same place and day.
Anywhere with a latitude and a longitude. Above the Arctic and below the Antarctic Circle the sun can fail to rise or set at all for weeks at a time, and rather than printing a nonsense time this page says so plainly — midnight sun or polar night — and reports day length as 24 hours or zero. The twilight tiers are handled separately, because a place can easily be in permanent daylight while its civil dawn still exists, or the reverse.
There is no account and no server of mine that receives anything from you. The page, the map library and the icons come from this site. The font comes from Google Fonts and the page statistics from SimpleAnalytics, which uses no cookies. All the sums are done in your browser.
Three things are sent elsewhere. While you type in the place search, the text goes to Open-Meteo (geocoding-api.open-meteo.com) to be turned into coordinates. When you choose a point that did not come from that search (a tap on the map, typed coordinates, or a link without a time zone), its coordinates rounded to about 100 metres go to Open-Meteo (api.open-meteo.com) with the single question which time zone it is in. And when you open the Map, the pictures come from Esri (server.arcgisonline.com), or from OpenStreetMap (tile.openstreetmap.org) if you choose the standard map; those servers see your address and the part of the world you look at.
In your browser the page stores your choices (view, panel, definition, clock, map style and plan options) under the key gh-ui, your last place under gh-place, your recent places under gh-places and the light or dark choice under jb-theme. Clearing the site data of your browser removes all of it.
The times assume a flat horizon at sea level and a clear sky. Hills, buildings and trees will bring the real moment forward in the evening or push it back in the morning, clouds hide it, and the air bends the light by a different amount from day to day. For far-away dates the clock rules of a place may still change, for instance when a country drops daylight saving, and the page uses the rules your browser knows. The place search and the time zone lookup need a connection to Open-Meteo; without it you can still type coordinates and pick the time zone yourself.