Golden Hour Calculator

What the golden hour is, and why photographers plan around it

Golden hour is the stretch of the day when the sun sits low — from just below the horizon up to about 6° above it — and its light has to travel a long, shallow path through the atmosphere. That path is a filter: the blue end of the spectrum is scattered away, what reaches the ground is warm and soft, shadows stretch long, and contrast drops to a level a sensor can hold in a single frame. It happens twice a day. In the morning it runs from before sunrise until the sun climbs past that 6° mark; in the evening it runs in reverse, from the moment the sun sinks to 6° until shortly after sunset. The calculator above uses exactly those boundaries: morning golden hour is the sun rising from −4° to +6°, evening golden hour is it falling from +6° back to −4°. Notice that both windows include a few minutes when the sun itself is below the horizon — photographers would be furious if they did not, because that afterglow and pre-glow is often the best light of the whole window. How long it lasts depends on where and when you are: near the equator the sun climbs steeply and the whole show can be over in half an hour, while at northern latitudes in winter the sun may never climb far past 6° at all, and the light stays low and kind for much of the day. There is no fixed “one hour” anywhere except the name — which is precisely why a date-and-place calculator beats a rule of thumb. For the bigger picture of working with this light once you are out in it, see how to use natural light in photography.

Blue hour: the quiet light on either side

Blue hour is golden hour's quieter neighbour. It is the period of twilight when the sun is between 4° and 6° below the horizon: direct sunlight has gone, but the upper atmosphere is still lit, and the sky turns a deep, even blue. In the morning it runs right up to the start of golden hour; in the evening it begins where golden hour ends and fades into full dark. It earns its place in a photographer's plan for one practical reason: for a few minutes, the brightness of the sky roughly matches the brightness of city lights, windows and street lamps, so a single exposure can hold both — no blown highlights, no pitch-black foreground. That balance is why blue hour is the classic window for cityscapes, harbours, bridges and architecture, and why the evening session rarely ends at sunset. Photographers who pack up when the sun dips miss the half hour when the city photographs best. Our guide to exploring urban photography at night picks up exactly where blue hour leaves off.

Planning a shoot with these numbers

Work backwards from the window, not forwards from your alarm clock. For an evening shoot: arrive during blue hour's daytime mirror — in practice, be at your location, composed and on the tripod at least 30–45 minutes before the evening golden hour starts. The early minutes are for scouting angles while you can still see clearly; then work through golden hour as the light warms and the shadows lengthen, take the sunset frames as they come, and stay put into blue hour for the lit-city versions of the same compositions. A morning shoot is the same film run backwards, with one honest warning: the good light comes first and the sleepiness is real, so do the scouting the evening before. Locations with a clear view towards the sun — west-facing for evening, east-facing for morning — get the longest, cleanest light, while valleys and dense city centres lose minutes to whatever blocks the horizon. Two companion tools round out a full day: if golden light is bright and you want to stretch an exposure through it, the ND filter calculator turns your metered shutter speed into a long-exposure one, and once the light is properly gone, the sharp-stars calculator works out how long you can expose the night sky before the stars begin to trail. Blue hour, golden hour, then the stars — that is a complete evening, planned from three numbers on this page.

Frequently asked questions

Why are the times an hour out in summer?

Daylight saving. Preset cities are calculated in their standard time all year round — Riyadh at UTC+3, London at UTC+0, New York at UTC−5 — because that is the honest, fixed basis a baked-in table can offer. If your city is currently on daylight time, add one hour to every time shown: London in July runs on UTC+1, so a golden hour listed as 19:05 – 20:02 happens at 20:05 – 21:02 by the clock on your wall. Custom coordinates avoid the trap differently — they are shown in your device's own time zone, with whatever offset your device is currently applying.

How accurate are these times?

They come from the standard solar equations published by NOAA — the same family of maths behind official sunrise tables — and for a flat, clear horizon they land within a few minutes of observed sunrise and sunset. What the maths cannot know is your actual horizon: hills, dunes, towers and even a tall hedge will hide the sun earlier in the evening and reveal it later in the morning, and haze changes when the light feels golden even when the geometry is exact. Treat the times as the plan, not the promise — arrive early and the terrain can only cost you minutes you have already banked.

Is my location private?

Yes. Every calculation runs in your browser, on this page, and nothing — no date, no city, no coordinates — is sent to a server or stored anywhere. The “Use my location” button asks your browser for coordinates only when you tap it, and only if you then allow your browser to share them; the numbers are filled into the boxes above and go no further. If you would rather not share at all, typing a latitude and longitude by hand works exactly as well.

How long does golden hour actually last?

It depends on latitude and season, which is the whole reason this calculator exists. Near the equator the sun rises and sets almost vertically, so the −4° to +6° climb takes roughly 40–50 minutes all year. At mid-latitudes it is closer to an hour in spring and autumn and stretches longer in winter, when the sun's path is shallow. Push far enough north or south in summer and golden hour can run for hours — the sun skims the horizon instead of crossing it — while around the solstices the highest latitudes lose sunrise and sunset entirely for a while, which this calculator reports honestly rather than inventing times for.