Sunrise & Sunset Calculator — Times for Any City and Date

Pick a city and a date: get sunrise, sunset, solar noon and golden hour, computed with the standard solar equations.

Sunrise & Sunset Times

What drives sunrise and sunset times

Two things: your latitude and the Earth's tilt. The planet spins at a constant speed, but its axis leans 23.4°, so the sun's path across your sky swings higher in summer and lower in winter. Near the equator (Singapore in the city list) daylight barely changes all year — about 12 hours, give or take minutes. At 50° latitude (London, Berlin) summer days stretch past 16 hours and winter ones shrink under 8.

Solar noon is the anchor

Sunrise and sunset are symmetric around solar noon — the moment the sun crosses your meridian. That is why the calculator also shows solar noon: if sunrise seems unusually late, check whether solar noon shifted, often the fingerprint of daylight saving time or a time-zone boundary rather than the season.

The maths behind the answer

The tool uses the standard low-precision solar equations published by NOAA: the sun's declination for the date, the hour angle at which the upper limb touches the 90.833° zenith (which includes refraction and the sun's apparent radius), and your longitude converted to local clock time. Accuracy is within about a minute for these latitudes.

FAQ

Why is sunrise not exactly 12 hours before sunset?

Two reasons: atmospheric refraction lifts the sun's image by about 0.5° at the horizon (making daylight longer), and Earth's elliptical orbit makes the solar day up to 30 seconds longer or shorter than 24 hours through the year.

Does the calculator account for daylight saving time?

It uses each city's standard UTC offset. During DST months, add one hour to the displayed times for cities that observe it.

What is the earliest sunset of the year?

Counter-intuitively, it happens about two weeks before the winter solstice at mid-latitudes, because the equation of time is changing faster than the declination is.