Sun position & golden hour planner
Where and when the sun rises and sets, golden hour and blue hour, and the sun's direction and height at any minute — for photographers, filmmakers and anyone placing solar panels or planning shade. Everything is calculated on your device.
Sun at
Sky chart: north at the top, the outer ring is the horizon and the centre is straight overhead. Dots are on the hour (local time).
Map and alerts
The map loads OpenStreetMap tiles only when you press “Show on map”; the tile server then sees roughly which area you are viewing. Nothing else leaves your device.
30-day planner
How the times are defined
- Sunrise and sunset: the moment the top edge of the sun meets a flat horizon, using the standard −0.833° (atmospheric refraction plus the sun's radius), as in the NOAA solar calculator.
- Golden hour: the sun between 6° above and 4° below the horizon. Blue hour: between 4° and 6° below. These are common photographers' conventions, not official definitions; light also depends on clouds and terrain.
- Sun direction (azimuth) is measured clockwise from true north — not magnetic north. A phone compass shows magnetic north unless it is set to true north.
- Elevation includes atmospheric refraction, so it matches what you see. Hills and buildings make the visible sunrise later and the sunset earlier than the flat-horizon time.
Accuracy
The app uses the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory solar position equations (after Meeus). Before release it is checked against the NREL Solar Position Algorithm for five places — Seoul, New York, Sydney, Reykjavik and Denver — within 0.3° for elevation, 0.5° for direction and 2 minutes for times. NOAA describes its sunrise and sunset results as theoretically accurate to within a minute between latitudes ±72° and within 10 minutes beyond them; real weather and air pressure can shift what you observe.
Source: NOAA GML Solar Calculator, calculation details — gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/calcdetails.html.
Privacy
Your location is used only inside this browser tab and is remembered only in this browser so the page opens where you left it. It is not sent to us or to anyone else. The optional map is the only part that contacts another server (OpenStreetMap tiles).