What time is golden hour today?

Choose a place and a date. You get the morning and evening golden hour, plus sunrise, solar noon, sunset and day length, worked out from the sun's position in your browser.

Place Date

What counts as golden hour here

Photographers use the phrase loosely, and sources draw the band in slightly different places, so two sites can disagree by a few minutes. This page uses the same definition as the SolarDial app, set by the height of the sun above the horizon:

Window	Sun's altitude
Golden hour	from 4° below the horizon to 6° above it
Blue hour	from 6° below to 4° below

Sunrise and sunset are the moments the sun's upper edge meets the horizon; the calculator places them at −0.833° for the sun's centre, which allows for the bending of light in the air and the size of the sun's disc. The morning golden hour therefore starts a little before sunrise and carries on until the sun is 6° up. The evening one starts when the sun is 6° up and ends a little after sunset.

How long does golden hour last?

It is not an hour. The length of the evening window on four dates, for four places, from the same calculation as above:

Evening golden hour	20 Mar	21 Jun	23 Sep	21 Dec
London	1 h 04 min	1 h 23 min	1 h 04 min	1 h 27 min
New York	53 min	1 h 02 min	53 min	1 h 03 min
Sydney	48 min	55 min	48 min	55 min
Singapore	40 min	44 min	40 min	44 min

The window is the time the sun takes to move through 10° of altitude. Near the equator it drops almost straight down and gets through that band in 40 to 45 minutes; the farther from the equator you are, the more slanted its path, and the longer the band lasts. In the far north and south the band can vanish altogether — see “The sun that never sets, or never gets low” below.

How the times are worked out

Where the sun is on that dateThe sun's declination and the equation of time come from the NOAA solar equations, evaluated for the day you pick.
When it crosses each altitudeFor your latitude, the hour angle at which the sun reaches 6° above, then 4° below the horizon gives the evening window; the same angles on the way up give the morning one. A second pass refines the result at the estimated time.
Into your clockLongitude turns that into UTC, and the time zone's offset on that date turns it into local time. The listed places use the zone's own daylight-saving rules; for your own coordinates you enter the offset yourself.

It is the same code, ported line for line, that SolarDial runs on the iPhone, and the page is tested against times the app's engine produced for fourteen place-and-date pairs. Times are rounded to the nearest minute.

The sun that never sets, or never gets low

At high latitudes — Reykjavík and Tromsø are examples — the calculation can have no answer. In midsummer the sun may stay above the horizon all day, with no sunrise, no sunset and no golden-hour window. A little further south it may set but never get down to 4° below the horizon, so the golden band, which ends there, never closes; on a day when these white nights begin or end, one window may be complete while the other is not. In midwinter the sun may not rise at all, or rise without ever climbing to 6°. The calculator says so instead of inventing times; try Tromsø or Reykjavík around the June solstice.

Honest about the limits

Astronomy, not weather. It knows where the sun is, not whether a cloud is in the way, so the light can still be flat when the window opens.
A minute, not a second. The equations are accurate to about a minute for sunrise and sunset at mid-latitudes, and less so near the poles. Hills, buildings and the horizon you can actually see move the real light earlier or later.
One definition. Golden hour here is −4° to +6° of sun altitude. Another site or app may use a different band and show different times.

The same times, on the iPhone

SolarDial computes all this on the iPhone with the same equations and no connection: a countdown to the next sun event, the golden and blue hour windows, a dial you can scrub through the day, and saved places.

Get SolarDial on the App Store What the app does

Last reviewed 21 October 2026