Golden Hour Calculator

The period around sunrise and sunset when the sun sits low in the sky — conventionally between about 6 degrees above and 4 degrees below the horizon. Light travels through more atmosphere, becoming warm, soft and directional: the most flattering natural light for portraits and landscapes.

It is rarely a literal hour. Near the equator it can pass in 25–40 minutes; at high latitudes in summer it can stretch for hours, and in polar regions the sun can stay in the golden zone all day. This calculator shows the exact window for your location and date.

The twilight window just before sunrise and after sunset when the sun is roughly 4 to 6 degrees below the horizon. The sky turns deep blue while city lights glow — ideal for cityscapes and moody landscapes. Its times are shown alongside golden hour above.

With standard NOAA solar-position formulas: the sun's declination and the equation of time give solar noon, and the hour-angle formula gives the moment the sun crosses each altitude — sunrise at −0.833°, golden hour bounds at +6° and −4°, blue hour at −6°. Accuracy is within a couple of minutes.

No. Everything is computed in your browser. If you tap Use my location, the coordinates come from your device's own geolocation and never leave the page — this site makes no network requests.

At high latitudes the sun can stay above or below a threshold all day — midnight sun or polar night. When a crossing does not happen, the calculator says so instead of inventing a time.

Your device's local time zone. If you are calculating for a distant destination, remember the times will display in your current zone unless your device is set to the destination's.

Light changes fast, so aperture priority around f/4–f/8 with auto-ISO works well; expose for the highlights and shoot toward or across the light for rim-lit subjects. In blue hour, a tripod and multi-second exposures bring out the glow.

Its EXIF metadata records the exact capture time. Use the free date checker on this site — or the EXIF Viewer by Fluntro app on iPhone and iPad — to read it from any original photo and see whether it really was golden hour.

Yes — free, no account, and it runs entirely in your browser. Once loaded it even works offline, handy at remote locations.