Golden Hour & Sun Position Calculator

About this tool

The golden hour is the stretch of time when the sun sits low enough that light turns warm, soft and long-shadowed. It is defined by the height of the sun, not by the clock: the usual boundaries are 6° above the horizon at the bright end and 4° below it at the dark end. Because the sun climbs at a different rate depending on where you are and what time of year it is, the window is not a fixed hour.

That is the first thing most calculators get wrong. On the same June day the golden hour lasts about 82 minutes in London and about 44 in Nairobi. In London itself it runs 64 minutes at the equinox, 83 at midsummer and 87 in midwinter. If you plan around "an hour after sunrise" you will either arrive too late in the tropics or leave too early at high latitudes, and both are easy to avoid once the window is computed rather than assumed.

The second thing they usually leave out is direction. Knowing that the light turns golden at 17:29 is only half of a shot; knowing that it comes from 262°, slightly south of due west, tells you where to stand. Every window here is given with the compass bearing of the sun at both ends, so you can line a street, a ridge or a coastline up with the light before you leave the house.

Some places and dates have no ordinary answer. Above the Arctic Circle in summer the sun never sets, and in winter it never rises, so there is no golden hour at all — this tool says so plainly rather than showing a blank table or a nonsense time. In between there are white nights, where the sun dips below the horizon but not far enough for every stage of twilight, and days near the solstice at high latitude where the sun never rises above 6°, making the whole daylight period golden. All three are named when they apply.

Why the blue hour and civil twilight overlap

They are two naming systems for the same minutes. Civil twilight ends at 6° below the horizon, while the blue hour runs from 4° to 6° below it, so the blue hour sits inside civil twilight and the table shows both readings.

One convention asks whether there is still enough light to work outdoors, and it ends at 6° below the horizon. The other asks what colour the sky is, and the deep blue band runs from 4° to 6° below. The two describe different things, so their edges do not line up, and a table that merged them into one set of rows would silently drop whichever reading you came for.

Here the blue hour appears twice over: it has its own card, and its minutes also sit inside the civil dawn and civil dusk rows. That looks like a duplicate and is not one. The blue hour answers when the sky is blue; civil twilight answers when artificial light starts to matter. Both are printed with the direction of the sun at each end.

Because the window is pinned to two angles rather than to a fixed twenty minutes, its length moves with latitude and season exactly as the golden hour does. On a June evening in London it lasts about twenty minutes and the sun travels from 317° to 321° across it, so the light at the closing end is much thinner than at the opening end.

Reading the sun direction at each end of a window

Every window is listed with two bearings: the direction of the sun when it opens and when it closes, measured from true north. A reading of 245° WSW means the light comes from the west-southwest, which is what tells you where to stand.

The bearing is measured clockwise from due north, so 0° is north, 90° east, 180° south and 270° west. A reading of 245° sits a little south of due west, which is the kind of detail that decides which side of a street or a ridge you set up on: a shot into the light and a shot with the light behind it are different photographs.

Each end of a window gets its own bearing, and over a long window the two can differ substantially. On a June evening in London the golden hour opens with the sun at 301° and closes at 317°, sixteen degrees of rotation while the quality of the light stays broadly the same. Planning around a single bearing taken at the start will miss the second half of the window.

The compass letter is the nearest of eight directions to the exact bearing, so each letter covers 45° of sky and the letter changes every 22.5°. The number is the precise reading; the letter is there to be read at a glance while you are deciding which way to point the camera.

Why solar noon is rarely at 12:00

Solar noon is the moment the sun is highest, and longitude plus the equation of time decide it rather than the clock. Anywhere off the meridian that defines your time zone sees the peak shifted, by up to half an hour at the zone edge.

A time zone is nominally fifteen degrees of longitude wide, so clock noon is the sun’s highest point only if you happen to stand on the meridian the zone is built around. Every degree away from it moves solar noon by four minutes, which puts the peak up to half an hour either side of twelve at the edges of a wide zone.

The second term is the equation of time, the running difference between the mean sun the clocks keep and the real sun in the sky. It reaches about plus sixteen minutes at the start of November and about minus fourteen in mid-February, so even on the defining meridian the peak wanders by a quarter of an hour across the year.

The tool prints solar noon next to the day’s highest sun, given as an altitude in degrees. That altitude is what swings hardest with the season, since it is the complement of your latitude plus the sun’s declination — which is why a noon sun in Reykjavík reaches about 2° in December and about 49° in June.

Sunrise is not at an altitude of 0°, it is at −0.833°

The moment the upper limb of the sun touches the horizon, its centre sits at −0.833°: refraction lifts the sun by about 34 arcminutes and its apparent radius is about 16, so the two add to roughly 50 arcminutes. Computing sunrise from 0° returns a time that is too late.

Compute sunrise as the moment the centre reaches 0° and the sky has already been light for several minutes by the time that happens. Those minutes are the refraction and the semidiameter: 34 plus 16 is about 50 arcminutes, which is 0.833 of a degree.

In time: the sun moves 15 degrees an hour, so 0.833 of a degree is a little over three minutes. Near the equator the figure is close to that, and it grows with latitude because the sun crosses the horizon at a slant.

The same effect acts on sunset, in the opposite direction, making it later. Day length is therefore systematically stretched — about six or seven minutes beyond 12 hours at the equator on an equinox. That is why the equinox is not a day of exactly twelve hours of daylight.

Every window on this page shares one set of altitude thresholds: golden hour from 6° down to −4°, blue hour from −6° to −4°, civil twilight from −6° to sunrise, then nautical at −12° and astronomical at −18°. The sunrise line uses −0.833 rather than 0, which is what makes the lower edge of golden hour meet sunrise.