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, blue hour, and peak color times, the narrower window inside golden and blue hour when the sky's color is most intense, and the detail that matters most if you shoot sunrise or sunset landscapes. The month-by-month summary below gives a faster answer if you already know roughly when you're traveling, or click a month to see every day.
Below the chart you can also turn on three optional weather overlays, explained in the section just below, including a chance of good light score built on the same model as the Sunrise & Sunset Forecast tool.
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.
Chance of Good Light: Share of days when the light was likely worth shooting: each day’s actual golden and blue hour is scored from cloud layers, humidity and rain, using the same model as the Sunrise & Sunset Forecast tool. A bare clear sky scores lower than a partly clouded one, since it has nothing to catch colour. Averaged over several recent years of historical weather. Tap the chart for the exact span.
Temperature Range: The typical daily high and low, shaded as a range, over several recent years of historical weather. A single average across the whole day would blur a hot afternoon and a cold morning into one number that describes neither. The high and low are what actually drive packing and gear planning, whether that means afternoon heat in a desert or overnight cold at altitude.
Chance of Rain or Snow (hourly): Share of hours with rain or snow actually falling (at least 0.5 mm an hour, so drizzle and trace amounts don’t count), over several recent years. Per hour rather than per day, because in this data almost every day sees a trace of something somewhere nearby.
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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.
Peak Color · +1° to −6° (overlay)
Not a separate time slice — it overlaps the tail of golden hour and all of blue hour. Fire-reds right at the horizon give way to magenta and purple through civil twilight, peaking around −4°.
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. The "Peak Color" band above is laid over the top of that (not a separate time slice): it's the narrower window, roughly +1° to −6°, where fire-red right at the horizon fades into magenta and purple through blue hour, peaking around −4° — the actual pop of color inside golden and blue hour, rather than the full warm or cool light each band produces throughout.
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, so peak color, the narrower reds-to-purple window inside that same range, runs nearly as long as golden hour itself instead of the few minutes it lasts at lower latitudes.
See how this played out on a real trip in the Iceland photography guide, or browse the results in the Iceland print gallery.
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. Peak color sits across the seam between them (roughly +1° to -6°): not a separate stretch of time, but the narrower window inside the tail of golden hour and all of blue hour where the sky's color is most saturated, fire-red near the horizon fading through magenta into purple. If you're chasing the most vivid color rather than just warm light, peak color is the window to watch. 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 and a cloud-quality forecast score, try the sunrise sunset forecast tool. After the light fades, the Milky Way planner rates the whole year for shooting the galactic core, and the blog covers how individual images were planned and made.
Found a bug, have feedback, or want to see a new tool?
The Golden Hour & Blue Hour Trends Tool is one of a handful of free tools I've built for photographers. Let me know what worked, what didn't, or what you'd like to see built next.
Get in TouchNew limited edition prints are released a few times a year, and this is also where new tools and updates to existing ones get announced. Join the list to hear first.
Limited edition fine art prints planned around exactly this kind of light, on gallery acrylic and FujiFlex paper, with free shipping in the US.
