Location
Date
Local horizon
Hills, buildings and trees hide the sun before it reaches the true horizon. Raise this to see how much daylight your site actually loses.
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Sun path for your location
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Today
Daylight through the day
Daylight through the year
Month by month
| Month | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight | Noon altitude | Sunrise bearing | Sunset bearing |
|---|
Calculated for the 15th of each month at the selected location.
Reading the diagram
You are at the centre. The compass view is the whole sky seen from directly above your head, flattened onto a disc — you stand in the middle, marked YOU, and the rim is your horizon in every direction. The centre means two things at once, which is what trips people up: it is both where you are standing and the point straight overhead, because looking straight up means looking at the sky above yourself.
So the further a point sits from the centre, the lower the sun is; the letters round the rim are the direction you would turn to face. A sun marker near the bottom edge means low in the sky toward the south — turn south, look near the horizon. A marker close to the middle means nearly overhead.
Horizon view is the same information as if you were standing outside turning slowly on the spot: compass bearing runs left to right, height above the horizon runs bottom to top. It is the better view for judging whether the sun will clear a neighbouring building, because a real obstruction has a height you can compare directly against the curve.
Common questions
Why is solar noon not at 12:00?
Two reasons. Time zones are wide political bands, so unless you sit exactly on your zone's central meridian your solar noon is offset by four minutes for every degree of longitude. On top of that, the equation of time shifts true solar noon by up to about sixteen minutes either way through the year, because Earth's orbit is elliptical and its axis is tilted. The tool applies both, which is why the solar noon shown here rarely lands on the hour.
Why does the sun rise north of east in summer?
Only at the equinoxes does the sun rise due east and set due west. As declination swings toward the summer solstice, sunrise moves progressively toward the north-east and sunset toward the north-west. In London the midsummer sun rises at a bearing of about 49° and sets around 311° — which is why a north-facing wall catches direct sun early and late on long summer days, and none at all in winter.
What does the local horizon slider do?
Published sunrise times assume a flat sea-level horizon. Real sites have hills, buildings and trees, and the sun is hidden until it clears them. Setting an obstruction angle shows how much daylight your site actually loses. A house across a narrow street typically blocks 25–40°; a distant ridge might be 5–10°. It is usually the single largest correction a real location needs.
Are daylight saving changes included?
Yes. Times use the real IANA timezone database for the location, so clocks go forward and back on the correct dates for that country, including places that do not observe daylight saving at all. Pick a date either side of a transition and you will see the one-hour jump in clock time while the underlying solar geometry moves smoothly.
How accurate are these times?
The algorithm is the NOAA formulation of Meeus's solar equations, good to roughly one arc minute for years 1800–2100. Compared against published almanacs the sunrise and sunset times here agree to within about a minute across latitudes from the equator to Reykjavík. Your local horizon will shift things far more than the arithmetic does.