Sunrise and sunset calculator

How to use it

Type a place name or coordinates, tap a spot on the map or use your location. Then choose the date: the arrows step one day at a time, so you can watch the day length change.

Times are always shown on the local clock of the place you picked, including daylight saving time where it applies, even if your device is in another time zone; if they differ, the tool tells you. On the map, the two lines show where the sun rises and sets on that day.

Below you’ll find the day hour by hour, a chart of the whole year (tap it to jump to another day) and the table for the month, which you can download as a CSV file for Excel or Google Sheets.

What each twilight means

Twilight is the time when the sun is already below the horizon but still lights up the sky. It comes in three stages, depending on how far below the horizon the sun is:

Civil twilight (0° to 6° below the horizon)

There’s plenty of light to walk around or read outdoors without streetlights. The planets and the brightest stars appear.

Nautical twilight (6° to 12°)

Many stars are out and you can still make out the horizon at sea: this was when sailors measured star heights with a sextant.

Astronomical twilight (12° to 18°)

It looks like night to the naked eye, but the sky isn’t fully dark yet: faint galaxies and nebulae are still hard to see.

Night (more than 18° below the horizon)

The sun no longer lights any part of the sky.

The farther you are from the equator, the longer twilight lasts, because the sun sinks at a slant. In New York, morning civil twilight lasts 27 min at the March equinox, 33 min at the June solstice and 31 min at the December solstice. In summer, north of about 49° latitude the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so it never gets fully dark; farther north there are white nights and, past the Arctic Circle, the midnight sun.

Golden hour and blue hour

These are photographers’ favorite times of day. During golden hour the sun is very low, so its light crosses a lot of atmosphere and arrives warm and soft, with long shadows. During blue hour the sun has already set (or hasn’t risen yet) and the sky turns a deep blue that looks great with city lights.

Neither has an official definition. We use the most common one in photography: golden hour with the sun between 6° above the horizon and 4° below it, and blue hour between 4° and 6° below. Other sites use other limits, so their times may differ by a few minutes. And they don’t always last an hour: in New York, the morning golden hour lasts 53 min at the March equinox and 1 hr 2 min at the June solstice; it’s shorter near the equator and much longer at high latitudes.

Why the longest day doesn’t have the earliest sunrise

In 2026, the longest day in New York is June 21, 2026, with 15 hr 6 min of daylight. But the earliest sunrise of the year is on June 14, 2026 (5:24 AM) and the latest sunset on June 27, 2026 (8:31 PM). Winter works the same way in reverse: the shortest day is December 21, 2026, but the earliest sunset is on December 7, 2026 (4:28 PM) and the latest winter sunrise on January 4, 2026 (7:20 AM).

That’s because solar noon, the moment the sun is highest, doesn’t fall at the same clock time every day. Earth’s orbit is an ellipse and its axis is tilted, so the sun runs ahead of or behind the clock over the year: this is called the equation of time. In December it falls behind by about half a minute a day; in New York, solar noon moves from 11:45 AM on December 1 to 11:59 AM on December 31, 14 minutes later. So even while the days keep getting shorter until the solstice, sunsets start getting later before it.

You can see it in the year chart under “Sunrise and sunset.” Where clocks change, the chart also shows the two one-hour jumps (in New York, on March 8, 2026 and November 1, 2026), which move sunrise and sunset but don’t change the length of the day.

Midnight sun and polar night

North of the Arctic Circle (66.6° N) or south of the Antarctic Circle, there are days when the sun doesn’t set and days when it doesn’t rise. The closer you get to the pole, the longer those periods last; at the pole itself, the sun rises once a year and sets once a year.

In Utqiaġvik, Alaska, in 2026, the midnight sun lasts from May 11, 2026 to August 1, 2026 (83 days) and polar night from November 19, 2026 to January 22, 2027 (65 days). Even then it isn’t pitch dark all day: around noon the sun is only a few degrees below the horizon and there are a few hours of twilight.

The calculator handles this: on those days you’ll see “Midnight sun” or “Polar night” instead of a time, and a day length of 24 hours or zero.

How it’s calculated and how accurate it is

We work out the sun’s position with Astronomy Engine, an open-source library based on the VSOP87 models, accurate to within one arcminute. Sunrise and sunset are the moments when the top edge of the sun touches the horizon, allowing for the 34′ the atmosphere lifts its image and for its apparent radius, just like the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) and Spain’s national observatory (OAN) do.

We checked it against their official tables: 4,878 USNO sunrises and sunsets for 2026 in seven places (from Tromsø to Ushuaia, with Kiritimati and Samoa on either side of the date line), 1,460 more for 1900 and 2100, 1,460 OAN times for Madrid and Las Palmas (in official time, clock changes included) and 3,816 twilight times. In every case the difference is one minute at most, which is what rounding allows.

Real times can vary a little: the calculation assumes a clear horizon at sea level. If there are mountains in the way, the sun will rise later and set earlier; from a high spot, such as a summit or a plane, you see it sooner and longer. And atmospheric refraction changes with temperature and pressure, which can shift sunrise and sunset by a minute or more.

Today’s sunrise and sunset in your city

This tool works for any place and any date. If you’d rather check your own city’s times every day, TidePlanet, our tide website, has a page for each place with today’s sunrise and sunset.

Sunrise and sunset on TidePlanet TidePlanet is made by the same team as Mapsfera.