Free tool
Plan outdoor shoots around sunrise, sunset, blue hour, twilight, and the sun's path. Pick a city or enter exact coordinates for the location you will shoot from.
86 deg azimuth
274 deg azimuth
64 minutes
63 minutes
13 minutes
13 minutes
Elevation for London
Golden hour is the low-angle light around sunrise and sunset, here calculated from the sun at -4 degrees to +6 degrees elevation. Blue hour sits just below it, from -6 degrees to -4 degrees, when the sky still carries color but direct sunlight is gone.
Low sun angle stretches shadows, reveals texture, and gives foreground shapes more depth. The exact clock time moves with latitude, season, elevation, and terrain, so a personal location beats a generic sunrise table.
Civil twilight ends at -6 degrees, nautical at -12 degrees, and astronomical at -18 degrees. For planning, civil twilight is often enough for scouting and setup, while nautical and astronomical twilight matter more for cityscapes, seascapes, and night sky work.
Between -4 and +6 degrees of solar elevation lies a 10 degree slice of sky, and the length of golden hour is simply how long the sun needs to travel through it. Near the equator the sun rises almost vertically at close to 15 degrees per hour, so the whole window passes in roughly 40 minutes. At around 50 degrees of latitude the climb is much shallower, and near an equinox the same slice takes roughly an hour. Toward the polar circles in midsummer the sun can skim along the horizon inside the golden band for hours, which is why photographers travel far north or far south in June and December.
The equinoxes add one more planning gift. With the sun on the celestial equator, it rises very close to due east (azimuth near 90 degrees) and sets very close to due west (near 270 degrees) at any latitude. The azimuth figures beside sunrise and sunset in the results let you line that bearing up against a map before committing to a location.
Every boundary on this page is found by sampling the sun's elevation through the local day at the chosen coordinates, then narrowing each crossing down to the nearest minute. The same elevation model produces every window: civil twilight at -6 degrees, nautical at -12, astronomical at -18, blue hour from -6 to -4, and golden hour from -4 to +6. Because a single sun path drives all of them, the windows always nest consistently instead of overlapping or leaving gaps.
Any window can read "None". That is a real answer, not a failure: on that date at that place the sun never crosses the required elevations. Two cases repeat every year. Above roughly 48.5 degrees of latitude the sun stays higher than -18 degrees all night around the June solstice, so the astronomical twilight row empties and true darkness never arrives. Well beyond the polar circles in midsummer the sun may never drop below -4 degrees at all, so blue hour disappears while a long grazing golden light remains.
The reverse happens in polar winter. When the sun rises but never climbs past +6 degrees, the defined golden windows have no upper boundary to cross, so the cards can read "None" even though the midday light itself stays low and warm. When a date you care about shows missing windows, step the date picker forward a week at a time to find when they reappear.
All times on this page render in your device's timezone, even when the chosen location is elsewhere, so you can plan travel and calls from where you are right now. The underlying calculation always uses the location's own local date.
Blue hour here is the deepest slice of civil twilight, from -6 to -4 degrees of solar elevation. Civil twilight covers the wider stretch from -6 degrees up to sunrise, so every blue hour minute is also civil twilight, but not the reverse.
The sun's rising point swings north and south of due east as its declination changes with the seasons. The swing is small in the tropics and very wide at high latitudes, which is why the compass bearings shift week to week.
No. Refraction is assumed at a standard value and the horizon is treated as flat and at sea level. Mountains, buildings, and unusual atmospheric conditions shift the visible moments, so scout how your own horizon differs.
The starting time of the evening golden hour for each of the next seven days at the chosen spot, useful for picking which evening of a trip to reserve for the main shoot.
Pair this with the time zone converter when planning a remote shoot brief across teams or clients.