Astronomical & visual time
Sunrise, sunset & golden hour
Plan around the light. See today's sunrise, sunset, golden hour, blue hour, solar noon, and day length for any city — computed from the sun's real position, right in your browser.
Times are shown in Los Angeles's local zone for today. Golden and blue hours are approximate windows for photography and vary with terrain and weather.
How to use the sunrise, sunset & golden hour
Choose a location
Pick any city. Sun times depend on latitude and longitude, not on the time zone, so the calculation uses the city's real coordinates and then presents the result in its local clock time.
Read the day's shape
The track shows the sun's elevation across the whole local day. Where it crosses zero you get sunrise and sunset; where it crosses −6° you get civil dawn and dusk; where it crosses +6° you get the edges of golden hour.
Plan around golden and blue hour
Morning golden hour runs from sunrise until the sun reaches 6° up; the evening one runs from 6° back down to the horizon. Blue hour is the stretch below the horizon before dawn and after dusk.
Check day length
Total daylight and the exact solar-noon time are listed alongside. Near the solstices these change by only seconds a day; near the equinoxes they can shift by several minutes.
Sunrise, twilight and golden hour, defined properly
Sunrise is defined as the moment the upper edge of the sun's disc appears above the horizon — not its centre. Atmospheric refraction bends light around the curve of Earth by roughly half a degree, which means the sun is geometrically still below the horizon when you first see it. Both effects are built into these times, which is why they agree with an almanac rather than with a naive geometric calculation.
Twilight comes in three official bands, all defined by how far the sun's centre sits below the horizon. Civil twilight (0° to −6°) is bright enough to read and work outdoors. Nautical twilight (−6° to −12°) is when the horizon is still visible at sea for sextant work. Astronomical twilight (−12° to −18°) is when the last skyglow leaves and faint objects become observable.
Golden hour is a photographic convention rather than an astronomical one, usually taken as the sun sitting between the horizon and about 6° of elevation. Light is warm and directional because it is travelling through far more atmosphere. It is emphatically not an hour long: near the equator it can be twenty minutes, and above the Arctic Circle in summer it can last most of the night.
These times are computed here by sampling the sun's elevation minute by minute across the local day and interpolating each threshold crossing, rather than by solving the sunrise equation in closed form. That approach stays stable at extreme latitudes, where the closed-form solution has no answer at all because the sun never crosses the horizon.
When you'd reach for it
Photography and film
Plan a shoot around golden hour and blue hour in a city you have not visited yet.
Outdoor sport
Work out how much usable light is left after work for a run, a climb or a round.
Ramadan and prayer timing
Dawn and dusk thresholds are the basis of fasting and prayer windows in many traditions.
Gardening and agriculture
Day length drives flowering and growth far more than temperature does.
Solar installations
Estimate the productive window and peak-sun position for a given latitude.
Travel to high latitudes
Understand what "midnight sun" or a four-hour winter day will actually feel like before you book.
Questions & answers
- What is golden hour?
- Golden hour is the period after sunrise and before sunset when the sun sits low (roughly 0–6° above the horizon), casting warm, soft, directional light that photographers prize. This tool marks both the morning and evening windows.
- What is the difference between golden hour and blue hour?
- Blue hour is the twilight period when the sun is just below the horizon (about 0 to −6°), giving cool, even, blue-toned light. It falls before sunrise and after sunset, bracketing golden hour.
- How accurate are the times?
- Times are derived from a solar-position model accurate to well under a degree, sampled to the minute. They assume a flat horizon at sea level; local terrain, elevation, and atmospheric conditions can shift the real light by a few minutes.