Golden Hour Calculator
Find the best light for photos: golden hour, blue hour, sunrise and sunset for any place and date.
Loading Golden Hour Calculator… If nothing happens, please enable JavaScript.
Golden hour is the stretch of time just after sunrise and just before sunset when the sun sits low in the sky and its light travels through more of the atmosphere. Blue light is scattered away, shadows grow long and soft, and faces, buildings and landscapes take on a warm glow that is hard to recreate later in editing. Blue hour comes on the other side of the horizon: the sun is a few degrees below it, direct light is gone, and the sky fills with an even, deep blue that suits city lights, reflections in water and long exposures. This calculator gives you the exact start and end of both, morning and evening, for any city or pair of coordinates on any date, together with sunrise, sunset, solar noon, the three kinds of twilight and the length of the day.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is golden hour?
What is blue hour and when does it happen?
Why does golden hour length change with the season and place?
What are civil, nautical and astronomical twilight?
How accurate are these times?
What happens near the poles?
Does the tool send my location anywhere?
Which time zone are the times shown in?
About Golden Hour Calculator
Pick one of about 170 cities spread over every continent, type a latitude and longitude, or let the browser use your current position. Times are shown in the local time zone of the place you chose, with correct daylight saving time for that date, and you can add a second column in your own time zone when you are planning a trip or a remote shoot. A timeline bar paints the whole day by light phase, from night through astronomical, nautical and blue twilight to golden hour and full daylight, and the curve above it shows how high the sun climbs. Drag the time slider or tap the bar to see the sun's elevation, its compass direction and how long shadows are at that moment, and use the sun path diagram to see where on the horizon the sun rises and sets, which matters when you want it behind a building, over the sea or lined up along a street.
The definitions follow common photography practice: golden hour lasts while the centre of the sun is between 4° below and 6° above the horizon, and blue hour while it is between 6° and 4° below. Sunrise and sunset use the standard 0.833° below the horizon, which accounts for atmospheric refraction and the radius of the sun's disc, the same convention used by national almanacs. Positions come from the NOAA solar equations, run entirely in your browser, and agree with published tables to within about a minute at ordinary latitudes. Close to the poles the tool handles midnight sun and polar night gracefully: if the sun never sets, never rises or never climbs above 6°, it says so and shows the phases that do occur. Real light also depends on clouds, haze and terrain, so treat the times as a plan and arrive a little early.
Why low sunlight looks golden
Sunlight near midday crosses roughly one thickness of atmosphere before it reaches you. When the sun is only a few degrees above the horizon, its light travels through ten to thirty times as much air. Along that long path, air molecules scatter short blue wavelengths far more strongly than long red ones, an effect described by Lord Rayleigh in 1871, so most of the blue is removed from the direct beam and what arrives is warm, orange and soft. The same scattering is why the sky itself is blue at noon.
The atmosphere also bends light. Near the horizon refraction lifts the image of the sun by about half a degree, roughly the width of the solar disc, so when you watch the sun appear to touch the horizon at sunset it has, geometrically, already gone below it. Almanacs fold this in by defining sunrise and sunset as the moment the centre of the sun is 0.833° below the horizon: 34 arcminutes of refraction plus 16 arcminutes for the sun's radius.
The pink band that appears opposite the sunset during blue hour has a name too: the Belt of Venus. Below it sits a dark blue strip, the shadow of the Earth itself projected onto the atmosphere, which rises as the sun sinks further.