Sunvane Golden Hour

Plan photography with golden hour time, sunrise sunset times, blue hour and twilight times for a city and local date. Sunvane Golden Hour calculates morning and evening light windows, solar noon, day length, and sunrise and sunset direction. Use the interactive card to change a city or date.

Plan photography golden hour shoots for 1 to 31 days, then download an ICS calendar with one event per light window and a CSV table. Compare day length between two dates, or use a year for its equinoxes and solstices. Local times use IANA time zones and daylight saving changes. Missing polar events are reported.

Golden hour means sun altitude −4° to +6°; blue hour −6° to −4°. Sunrise/sunset use −0.833°; civil, nautical and astronomical twilight use −6°, −12° and −18°. Windows crossing local midnight are clipped and marked.

Examples: golden hour calculator for New York, NY, on 06/21/2026; evening shoots in Los Angeles, CA, starting 10/12/2026 for 7 days.

Limits: a flat horizon at sea level; hills, buildings and weather change the real light. Accuracy is about one minute below 66° latitude and uncertainty increases near polar transitions. City coverage is population 50,000+ plus Tromso; dates 1900–2100. Day length is daylight within a local civil date. City matches are ranked by population; the first is used and other matches are listed so country or US state can narrow it. Files do not change a calendar. Local clocks follow the host IANA time-zone database; future rules may change.

City data adapted from GeoNames (https://www.geonames.org/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).