Sunrise & Sunset Calculator

Free sunrise and sunset times for any location worldwide. Civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight; morning and evening golden hour; day length and solar noon. With a map preview, a 24-hour timeline visualisation, a month view, and a year graph showing the full annual cycle plus solstices and equinoxes.

Sunrise & sunset, plus everything else the sun does in a day

The basic question — "what time does the sun rise and set today at my location?" — is the easy half of this tool. The other half is everything that happens around those two events: the three twilight phases that bracket the day (civil, nautical, astronomical), the morning and evening golden hour windows that photographers chase, the deep cobalt blue hour just before dawn and after dusk, and the position of the sun at noon (its altitude above the horizon and its azimuth from north).

We pack those into three views. Single Day shows the full breakdown for one date with a 24-hour timeline visualisation. Month View shows every day of the selected month as a table — useful for planning a multi-week trip or tracking how day length shifts week-to-week. Year Graph draws the full annual cycle of sunrise and sunset as two curves with the daytime area filled in between, plus dashed markers at the solstices and equinoxes — the cleanest way to see how your latitude shapes the year.

How to find sunrise and sunset times

Six steps from blank input to a full breakdown of the solar day at your location.

1. Pick a location. Search for a city, address, or landmark; click anywhere on the world map; or tap "My Location" to use your device GPS. The marker pin updates instantly and the time-zone for that location is resolved automatically.
2. Pick a date. Choose any date — past or future — using the date input. The Previous / Today / Next buttons jump one day at a time. The tool computes sunrise and sunset across the full Gregorian calendar; ranges from 1900–2100 are routinely accurate.
3. Read the headline times. Sunrise, sunset, day length, and solar noon appear in the orange hero panel. Times are formatted in the location’s local time zone (with daylight saving handled automatically). Solar noon includes the sun’s altitude in degrees above the horizon.
4. Inspect the 24-hour timeline. The horizontal timeline shows the full day as colored bands: dark blue for astronomical night, lighter blues for nautical and civil twilight, golden bands for the golden hour, and warm yellow for daytime. The 🌅 and 🌇 markers pin the exact sunrise and sunset positions.
5. Read all phases. The phase grid lists every twilight and golden-hour transition: astronomical, nautical, and civil dawn / dusk plus the morning and evening golden hour boundaries. Sunrise, solar noon, and sunset are highlighted with a golden left border.
6. Switch to Month or Year view. Month view shows a sortable table of sunrise / sunset / day length for every day of the selected month. Year graph shows the full annual cycle as a line chart with sunrise (golden), sunset (rust), the daytime fill area, and dashed markers for the solstices and equinoxes.

What people use a sunrise / sunset calculator for

Seven recurring patterns we see in the analytics — each one uses a different combination of the headline times, the twilight phases, and the year-cycle view.

Civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight — what each one means

Twilight is the gradient of light between full daylight and full night. It splits cleanly into three named phases based on how far the sun is below the horizon. Each phase has a morning (dawn) and evening (dusk) version. The tool reports all six transitions; the table below explains what each one means and what it\u2019s commonly used for.

Below astronomical twilight (sun below −18°) is true night — the sky is fully dark and the Milky Way and faint deep-sky objects are visible. Above civil twilight (sun above 0°) is daylight; above 6° begins golden hour, and above ~10° normal daytime conditions prevail.

Golden hour — the photographer\u2019s favourite light

Golden hour is the window when the sun is between 0° and 6° above the horizon — a few minutes either side of sunrise and sunset, plus the soft directional light that follows. The physics: at low sun angles, sunlight travels through several times more atmosphere than at noon, scattering blue and green wavelengths (Rayleigh scattering) and leaving a warm orange- red light. The sun is also a smaller apparent disc in the sky, producing softer, more diffuse shadows and flattering skin tones in portraits.

Duration depends on latitude. In mid-latitudes (e.g., New York, Paris, Tokyo) the golden hour lasts about 30–60 minutes in spring and autumn and longer in winter. Near the tropics, where the sun sets nearly perpendicular to the horizon, golden hour is short — maybe 20 minutes. Near the polar circles in summer, the sun stays low for hours and golden-hour light persists from the late afternoon all the way to true sunset.

Use the timeline visualisation: the golden bands directly mark the morning and evening golden-hour windows. Use the year graph to find a date when sunset (and therefore golden hour) falls at a target time of day at your location.

Blue hour — the deep blue between day and night

Blue hour is the window before sunrise and after sunset when the sun is roughly 4°–8° below the horizon. Direct sunlight is absent, but residual sky scattering produces a deep cobalt blue overhead, fading toward warmer tones near the horizon. It overlaps with the lighter end of civil twilight and the brighter end of nautical twilight.

Cityscape photographers love the blue hour because the artificial lights of a city are on and "balance" with the still-coloured sky — neither washes out the other. Wedding photographers schedule the blue hour for portraits with cityscape backdrops.

How sunrise / sunset times are calculated

The math is well-established and dates back to Spencer\u2019s 1971 algorithm and NOAA\u2019s widely-used "Solar Position Algorithm" implementation. The full calculation has three stages.

Stage 1 — Compute the sun\u2019s ecliptic longitude

From the Julian date of the target time, calculate the mean longitude of the sun, the equation of centre (a periodic correction for the Earth\u2019s elliptical orbit), and the true ecliptic longitude. Add the obliquity correction for the slight wobble of Earth\u2019s axis (nutation).

Stage 2 — Convert to right ascension and declination

Project the ecliptic longitude onto the celestial equator using the obliquity of the ecliptic (≈23.44°). The result is the sun\u2019s right ascension and declination — its coordinates on the celestial sphere. Combined with the observer\u2019s latitude and the sidereal time, this gives the local hour angle.

Stage 3 — Solve for the time when the sun crosses each elevation

Sunrise is the moment the sun\u2019s upper limb crosses the geometric horizon. We add a standard atmospheric-refraction correction of 34′ (so the algorithm targets the sun\u2019s centre at −0.833° rather than 0°) and solve the resulting trigonometric equation for time. Civil dawn / dusk solve the same equation at −6°, nautical at −12°, astronomical at −18°. Golden-hour transitions solve at +6° (sun above horizon).

SunCalc, the open-source library underneath this tool, implements that math in ~200 lines of JavaScript and matches NOAA\u2019s reference implementation to within ±1 second across all latitudes from 80° N to 80° S. The library is BSD-licensed and battle-tested in millions of production applications.

The annual cycle — why every year looks the same

Earth\u2019s axial tilt of 23.4° causes a hemisphere to face the sun more directly in summer (longer days) and away from the sun in winter (shorter days). The four cardinal points of the cycle are:

• March equinox (around 20 March) — the sun crosses the celestial equator heading north. Day and night are roughly equal everywhere on Earth.
• June solstice (around 21 June) — the sun reaches its northernmost declination. Longest day in the northern hemisphere; shortest in the southern hemisphere.
• September equinox (around 23 September) — the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south. Day and night again roughly equal.
• December solstice (around 21 December) — sun at its southernmost declination. Shortest day in the northern hemisphere; longest in the southern.

The Year Graph view marks all four with dashed vertical lines. The shape of the daytime fill area shows your latitude\u2019s "personality": near the equator the fill is roughly uniform 12-hour bands; near the poles it tapers to zero (polar night) or expands to 24 hours (midnight sun); in temperate latitudes you see a smooth sinusoidal annual cycle.

SimpleMapLab vs other sunrise / sunset tools

Honest comparison against the alternatives. Each tool wins different scenarios.

timeanddate.com is the encyclopaedic reference — exhaustive but ad-heavy and slow. PhotoPills is the photographer\u2019s favourite paid app, with augmented-reality features SimpleMapLab doesn\u2019t try to match. SunCalc.org is the closest sibling — the same library, similar philosophy — without the year graph, mobile polish, or month view. We optimise for "browser- first, no-sign-up, decision in 5 seconds" — the answer for the 80% case where you don\u2019t need a paid app.

Related tools and resources

For the time zone of a location (which the calculator uses internally), see Time Zone Finder. For elevation, which affects the geometric horizon at very high altitudes, see Elevation Finder. For a precise latitude/longitude lookup of any city or address, see Latitude & Longitude Finder and Coordinates to Address. For annotating a map with your shoot locations, see Map with Legend Maker and Map Drawer.

Frequently asked questions

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