Search any location and see a full year of light, mapped as a single chart: night, twilight, golden hour, and full daylight, laid out day by day. The bands curve with the seasons, and at high latitude they can curve dramatically. In Iceland during midnight sun, golden hour can stretch to nearly four hours because the sun's path stays shallow near the horizon instead of climbing straight up and back down.
Hover or tap any date on the chart for exact local sunrise, sunset, golden hour, and blue hour times. The month-by-month summary below gives a faster answer if you already know roughly when you're traveling.
I built this after running into the same question over and over while planning shoots: not just when the sun rises and sets, but how long the light actually stays usable, somewhere I've never shot before.
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Night · below −18°
Full darkness — the sky holds no residual sunlight; only stars, the moon, and artificial light remain.
Astronomical Twilight · −18° to −12°
The faintest hint of light on the horizon — too dim to work by, but the sky is no longer fully black.
Nautical Twilight · −12° to −6°
The horizon becomes distinguishable against the sky; still too dark for most photography without long exposures.
Blue Hour · −6° to −0.833°
Soft, even, cool-toned light with no direct sun — the "blue" comes from skylight scattering alone.
Golden Hour · −0.833° to 6°
Low, warm, directional light with long shadows — the classic "golden" look prized by photographers.
Full Daylight · above 6°
The sun is high enough to produce hard, direct light with short shadows and high contrast.
Phases are defined by the sun's angle above the horizon, matching the standard astronomical definitions of civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight. On the chart, "full daylight" is the stretch strictly between the morning and evening golden hour windows, so every band adds up to a full day with nothing double-counted.
At high latitude in summer, the sun doesn't rise straight up and set straight down, it tracks nearly sideways along the horizon. That shallow path means it spends far longer within the golden hour and blue hour angle range (roughly −6° to +6°) than it would at a lower latitude, where the same climb happens almost vertically in under an hour. Near the summer solstice in Reykjavík, the sun can stay within that range, drifting through golden hour, blue hour, and back, for most of the night.
Golden hour is when the sun sits low in the sky (roughly −0.8° to +6°), producing warm, directional, low-angle light. Blue hour is the window just before sunrise and just after sunset (roughly −6° to −0.8°), when there's no direct sun at all, just soft, even, cool light from the sky. See the phase diagram above for the full breakdown.
Yes. Once a location is selected, its time zone is looked up and every local time shown, including in the chart tooltip, is resolved for that exact date, so clock times correctly shift across daylight saving transitions instead of drifting gradually.
The chart and tooltip call this out directly, showing "continuous daylight" (midnight sun) or "continuous night" (polar night) instead of a broken sunrise or sunset time on days where one doesn't occur.
I'm Brent Goldman, a landscape and nature photographer selling limited edition fine art prints. For a specific date and location with live weather, try the sunrise sunset forecast tool, and the blog covers how individual images were planned and made.
Limited edition fine art prints planned around exactly this kind of light, on gallery acrylic and FujiFlex paper, with free shipping in the US.
