When does the sun rise and set?
Ancient civilizations built monuments aligned with solar events — Stonehenge, Cairo, Chichen Itza. This calculator pulls real astronomical data for your location, accounting for atmospheric refraction, elevation, and your local timezone automatically.
Matching is flexible with typos and alternate spellings — if your exact town isn't found, try the nearest larger city.
If both fields are filled in, they're used instead of the city lookup above — otherwise leave them blank.
The exact moments you calculate here aren't just when the sun's center crosses the horizon — atmospheric refraction bends sunlight slightly upward, so the sun becomes visible about 2 minutes before actual sunrise, and stays visible about 2 minutes after actual sunset. That's why daylight always lasts a bit longer than the sun's true geometric position would suggest.
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Enter a city name (and optionally a state or country to disambiguate common city names) and we look up its coordinates, then pull real sunrise and sunset data for that spot and date — no manual latitude/longitude entry needed. The times returned already account for atmospheric refraction, elevation, and your location's local timezone.
Just a city name, an optional state or country, and a date. The state/country field helps when two cities share a name (e.g. Portland, Oregon vs. Portland, Maine). If you already know your exact latitude and longitude, an optional section lets you enter those directly instead — useful for precise or rural locations a city lookup might not pinpoint exactly. The date matters because the sun's path changes through the year — long days near the summer solstice, short days near winter.
The soft light shortly after sunrise and before sunset — the "golden hour" — is prized by photographers. Gardeners track daylight length for planting, hikers and paddlers plan around dusk, and travelers use these times to catch a sunrise viewpoint. Day length peaks at the summer solstice and bottoms out at the winter solstice.
City lookup resolves to that city's center, not an exact street address, so times can differ by a minute or two from your precise location. Near the poles the sun may not rise or set at all on some dates (polar night or midnight sun). For photography or casual planning this is plenty accurate; for navigation, aviation, or any safety-critical use, rely on an official source such as a national observatory or NOAA.
Example: Say you enter "New York" for the spring equinox. The calculator resolves the city to coordinates, then pulls real data showing sunrise around 6:00 AM and sunset around 6:00 PM local time, for a day length of roughly 12 hours — accurate for that exact date and location, refraction and elevation included.
Times come from a real astronomical data source, accounting for atmospheric refraction, elevation, and your local timezone automatically. The main source of imprecision is that a city name resolves to that city's center rather than an exact address, so times can differ by a minute or two from your precise spot. For navigation, aviation, or any safety-critical use, rely on an official source such as a national observatory or NOAA.
Near the poles, extreme latitudes can experience polar night (the sun never rises) or midnight sun (the sun never sets) on certain dates, depending on the time of year. If the location and date you enter fall into one of these periods, the underlying data source reports it instead of a normal sunrise/sunset time.
Golden hour is the soft, warm light shortly after sunrise and before sunset, prized by photographers for portraits and landscapes. Knowing your local sunrise/sunset times lets you plan to be in position before the light shifts.