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Golden Hour Calculator — Golden and Blue Hour Times for Any Location

The exact minutes the warm light starts and stops, for this morning and this evening, anywhere. Golden hour is defined here properly — the sun between the horizon and 6° above it — so you get the real duration for your latitude rather than a flat sixty minutes. The same page gives you blue hour, sunrise, sunset and solar noon, all three twilight tiers as dawn and dusk, day length and a year curve with the solstices and equinoxes marked.

right now
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daylight across the year —
▸ Everything is computed in this page. The maths is the NOAA solar position algorithm, accurate to roughly a minute. The only network request is the place search, and only when you type in it — your location and the times themselves are never sent anywhere.

Golden hour is almost never an hour

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.

PlaceLatitudeEvening golden hour, JuneEvening golden hour, December
Singapore1° N~24 min~24 min
Cairo30° N~30 min~27 min
Brussels51° N~52 min~38 min
Reykjavík64° N~2 h+~50 min

Near the equator the sun drops almost vertically and the window is barely twenty-five minutes — 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.

Morning golden hour is the one nobody uses

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.

Why the light goes warm at all

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.

Related tools

Tonight's Sky
Once astronomical twilight ends, this shows what is actually up there.
Aurora Watch
Northern lights forecast — needs the same dark hours.
Buienradar
Rain radar — whether you will actually see that sunset.
All tools
The rest of the free browser tools on this site.

## frequently asked questions

Photography
How long before sunset should I arrive for golden hour?

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 thirty-five minutes too early in Singapore and ten minutes 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.

Is golden hour the same as magic hour?

"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.

When exactly is golden hour?

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 can be under 25 minutes; at 60° north in June it stretches past 90. This page gives you the actual figure for your place and date instead of the name.

And blue hour?

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 20 to 40 minutes at mid-latitudes.

Can I put these times in my calendar?

Yes. Add to calendar downloads a standard .ics file with the day's sunrise, sunset and golden and blue hour windows as timed events, which 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 window shows up as a block of the right length rather than a point.

The times themselves
How accurate are these sunrise and sunset times?

Within about a minute for most of the populated world. The page uses the NOAA solar position algorithm, the same maths behind the US National Weather Service's own solar calculator, and it was checked against an independent implementation across 665 event times in nine cities — the largest disagreement was 4 seconds.

The remaining error 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.

Why does this differ from the time my weather app shows?

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.

What is solar noon, and why is it not 12:00?

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.

Does this handle daylight saving time?

Yes, and 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.

Twilight
What is the difference between civil, nautical and astronomical twilight?

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.

StageSun isWhat it means
Civil twilight0° 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.
What is the difference between dawn and sunrise?

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.

Why is twilight so much longer in summer, and in the north?

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.

Using it
Is my location sent anywhere?

No. The maths runs in the page, on your device. If you press locate, your coordinates are used in this tab and nowhere else — 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.

The one request that leaves your browser is the place search, and only while you type in it: the text goes to the Open-Meteo geocoding service to be turned into coordinates. Ignore that box and the page never talks to anything.

Can I share the exact result I am looking at?

Copy share link puts the place, coordinates, date and time zone into the URL. Whoever opens it 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.

Does it work for anywhere, including the Arctic?

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.