Sunrise and sunset times today, for any town

What time does the sun rise tomorrow, when does it set on the day of the wedding, and how much daylight is left after work in January? This page answers the plain questions about sunrise and sunset times without asking you to click anything first. It opens on today's date in the town that matches your browser's time zone – Copenhagen for Europe/Copenhagen, Chicago for America/Chicago – and shows sunrise, sunset and the length of the day in large figures. Your device's location is never requested unless you press "Use my location". Search your own town among 24,000 places, type coordinates, or click the map, and pick any date in the past or future. Below the big figures come the details people look up next: solar noon and how high the sun gets, the change in day length since yesterday, civil, nautical and astronomical twilight (first light and last light), and the golden and blue hours. Then the whole month as a table and the whole year as one chart. To plan a call, a trip or a family gathering across continents, add up to eight towns and read their sunrise, sunset and day length on the same date, each in its own local time, with summer time where it applies.

How to use it

1. Open the page – today's sunrise and sunset for the town of your time zone are shown at once.
2. Search your town, paste coordinates, press "Use my location" or click the map, and choose a date if it is not today.
3. Read sunrise, sunset, day length, first and last light and golden hour; scroll for the month table and the year chart.
4. Add towns to compare them on the same date, and download the towns, the month or the whole year as CSV, or copy the link.

How accurate is it?

Where the times come from

The times are calculated in your browser with the solar formulas published by NOAA, based on Jean Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms, and compared with PyEphem, an ephemeris built on the VSOP87 theory of the planets. Over 400 random days between 65° S and 65° N the sunrise and sunset differed by 1.4 seconds in the median and by 32 seconds at worst. The page rounds each time to the nearest minute, as almanacs and weather services do, so two sources can still differ by one minute.

The horizon you actually see

Sunrise and sunset are defined as the moment the top edge of the sun touches a flat horizon at sea level, with normal bending of the light by the air. A ridge, a row of houses or a forest to the west hides the sun earlier; a hilltop, a tall building or a view over the sea shows it longer. At mid latitudes one degree of hills on the horizon moves sunset by about five minutes, and unusual air temperatures move it by a minute or two.

Local time, summer time and the date line

Each place gets the time zone that covers it on the timezone-boundary-builder map, and the clock rules, including summer time, come from the IANA time zone database built into your browser. A day is the calendar day on the place's own clock, so on the night the clocks go back the day has 25 hours, and towns across the date line are compared on their own date, not yours.

Good to know

Sunrise and sunset are not symmetric around noon

Solar noon is rarely at 12:00 on the clock: it shifts with your position inside the time zone, with summer time and with the equation of time, which moves it by up to 16 minutes through the year. In Madrid the sun sets after 21:40 in June because solar noon there is after 14:00 in summer, and in Kashgar in western China, which keeps Beijing time, the sun can rise after 10:00 in winter.

First light comes long before sunrise

Civil twilight, when there is enough light to be outdoors without a lamp, starts when the sun is 6° below the horizon – about half an hour before sunrise at mid latitudes, but under twenty minutes near the equator and hours in a northern summer. Nautical (12°) and astronomical (18°) twilight start earlier still. In June in Scotland or Scandinavia astronomical twilight lasts all night, and the page says so.

Midnight sun and polar night

North of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle there are days with no sunrise or sunset. The page then shows "Midnight sun" or "Polar night" instead of a time and gives the day length as 24 hours or none; the year chart shows how many such days a place has. Near those latitudes the sun skims the horizon, so a small hill or a cold layer of air can change the times by many minutes.

Comparing towns across time zones

In the comparison every town keeps its own clock. Sydney and London on the same date in June give a short winter day and a long summer day, and their times are not converted to yours. Click a town in the list to make it the main place, with its month and year below, and press "The towns as CSV" to keep the list with time zone, UTC offset, twilight and solar noon.