How to find golden hour
- Type a city and pick it from the list. Before you type, the page shows a guess from your device's time zone.
- Pick a date. The page starts on the current date in that city.
- Read the morning and evening golden hour, blue hour, civil dawn and dusk, sunrise and sunset.
What golden hour is
Golden hour here is the time the sun spends between 6 degrees above the horizon and 4 degrees below it, so in the morning it starts a little before sunrise and in the evening it ends a little after sunset. The light is low and warm, and shadows are long and soft. Blue hour sits on the dark side of it, while the sun is 4 to 8 degrees below the horizon.
No official body defines golden hour or blue hour. The U.S. Naval Observatory and NOAA define civil twilight, which ends when the centre of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, but not golden or blue hour, and Wikipedia says blue hour has no official definition. Other calculators use other angles, so their times can differ.
How the times are worked out
The sun times are worked out in your browser with suncalc. Checked against the U.S. Naval Observatory for New York, London and Sydney on 1 November 2026, sunrise, sunset and civil twilight were within 28 seconds of its times, which it gives to the minute. Times here are rounded to the minute.
Times are in the local time of the city you pick, with daylight saving applied. They assume a flat, open horizon; hills, buildings and cloud change when the light reaches you.
Far north and far south, some dates have no golden hour, or one long one, and on some the sun does not set. The page says so in words.
Sources, read 25 October 2026: U.S. Naval Observatory, Rise, Set, and Twilight Definitions; NOAA Solar Calculator glossary; Wikipedia, Blue hour; Wikipedia, Golden hour (photography).
Questions
Is my location sent anywhere?
No. The page never asks for your device's location. The city list downloads once from this site when you first click the city field, and the search and the sun maths run on your device. The city and date you pick are not sent to creavio or anyone else.
Which places are listed?
12,459 places from GeoNames: every place with 50,000 people or more, and every capital. If your town is not listed, pick the nearest listed city.
Place names and positions from GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0, trimmed to places of 50,000 people or more and capitals. Sun times use suncalc 2.1.1, copyright 2026 Volodymyr Agafonkin, under the BSD 2-Clause license, included unmodified. Licence texts.