Sunrise & Sunset Calculator
Enter a location as lat, lon and a date to read sunrise, sunset, solar noon, day length, civil twilight and the golden hour — live, on the local clock you choose, computed in your browser.
Runs entirely in your browser. No location you type is uploaded or logged — the solar maths uses a small committed library and works offline.
Decimal degrees, latitude −90…90 and longitude −180…180 (negative = south / west). Times are shown on the UTC offset you pick — set it to your location's current offset (including any daylight-saving shift).
What this tool computes
Give it a point on Earth as a latitude, longitude pair and a calendar date, and it works out the key moments of the Sun's day at that place: civil dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, the start of the evening golden hour, civil dusk, and the total length of daylight. Every value recomputes the instant you change the coordinate, the date or the time zone, so you can scrub through a year and watch the days stretch and shrink.
The astronomy behind it
The calculator uses the solar-position algorithm published by NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, itself a streamlined version of the equations in Jean Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms. Two quantities do most of the work. The first is the Sun's declination — how far north or south of the celestial equator it sits on a given date, swinging between +23.4° at the June solstice and −23.4° in December because Earth's spin axis is tilted about 23.4° to its orbit. The second is the equation of time, a correction of up to about ±16 minutes that captures how Earth's elliptical orbit and axial tilt make the real Sun run ahead of or behind an even-ticking clock. From those two figures, plus your latitude and longitude, the tool solves for the hour angle at which the Sun's centre sits 90.833° from straight overhead — that extra 0.833° is the standard allowance for atmospheric refraction lifting the Sun's image near the horizon (about 34 arc-minutes) plus the Sun's own apparent radius (about 16 arc-minutes).
Why times shift with latitude and season
Sunrise and sunset are not fixed because the Sun's daily arc across the sky changes shape through the year. When the Sun's declination is high in June, the Northern Hemisphere tips toward it: the Sun climbs higher at noon and traces a longer path above the horizon, so it rises early and sets late. In December the geometry reverses and days are short. Latitude sets how dramatic this is. Near the equator the Sun rises and sets at a steep angle and day length barely moves across the year — always close to 12 hours. Move toward the poles and the swing grows, until above the Arctic and Antarctic circles (about 66.5°) the Sun can fail to set at all around midsummer (the midnight sun) or fail to rise around midwinter (polar night). This tool reports those two cases explicitly instead of inventing a time that does not exist.
Worked example: London on the June solstice
Enter London at 51.5074, -0.1278, the date 21 June, and set the offset to UTC+01:00 (British Summer Time). The tool returns roughly:
Two things are worth noticing. Solar noon lands at 13:02, not 12:00 — one hour of that is the BST offset, and the rest is longitude and the equation of time. And the day is over 16½ hours long: at London's latitude the midsummer Sun sits high and its arc is broad. Run the same location on 21 December and daylight collapses to under 8 hours — the same place, the same maths, an eight-hour swing driven entirely by the axial tilt.
Solar noon, twilight and the golden hour
Solar noon is the true middle of the day — the Sun at its highest, due south from the Northern Hemisphere. It is the anchor the algorithm builds everything else around: sunrise and sunset are symmetric about it, each offset by the same hour angle. Civil twilight brackets the usable low-light periods: civil dawn is when the Sun's centre first climbs to within 6° below the horizon in the morning, and civil dusk is when it drops back past that line in the evening — the window when there is enough scattered light to move around outdoors without lamps. The golden hour is the softer, warmer stretch when the Sun is low but still up; this tool flags the evening golden hour as the moment the Sun descends to 6° of elevation on its way down, which photographers use as the cue that the flattering light has begun.
Honest limits
This is a clear-sky, sea-level geometric model, and it is honest about what that excludes. It assumes the standard 0.833° of horizon refraction, so genuinely unusual air temperature or barometric pressure can move the real sunrise by a minute or more, and it cannot know about a hill, building or mountain on your horizon — from a valley the Sun appears late, from a summit early, and neither is captured here. It uses no daylight-saving database: you pick the UTC offset yourself, so remember to add the summer-time hour where it applies. The times ignore your elevation above sea level, which advances sunrise slightly on a high peak. For the overwhelming majority of places and dates the results land within about a minute of an official almanac, which is plenty for planning a shoot, a hike, a garden or a prayer time — but for surveying-grade precision, or for the exact instant at a specific altitude with a real skyline, consult a dedicated ephemeris. And near the poles, on any date the Sun never crosses the horizon, the tool tells you it is polar night or midnight sun rather than printing a sunrise that does not happen.