Sun times and sun angles by city

Why the same date looks so different from place to place

Latitude sets almost everything about how the sun behaves at a location. It fixes how high the sun climbs at noon, how far round the horizon sunrise swings between summer and winter, and how violently day length changes through the year. Two towns at the same latitude see very nearly the same sun, however far apart they are in longitude — the clock times differ, the geometry does not.

That is why this list is spaced out by latitude rather than by population. 12 cities from 26° to 56° cover the range of behaviour you are likely to care about, and the differences between them are large:

Longest and shortest are sunrise to sunset at the solstices, local time.

Notice how the swing between longest and shortest day widens as you move away from the equator, while the noon sun angle falls. Near the tropics the year is fairly even and the sun passes almost overhead; toward the poles the summer is enormous, the winter barely happens, and a low sun means long shadows for months at a time. That last point is what catches people out when they judge a house or a garden in July.

Your town not listed? It does not need to be. Every tool here takes any address or pair of coordinates, and the same arithmetic runs for all of them — these pages simply save you the typing for some common ones.