Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

How this calculator finds the times

The sun does not rise at a fixed hour, and the reason is geometry rather than weather. Earth's axis is tilted 23.44 degrees from the plane of its orbit, so on any given date the sun sits directly overhead at a latitude that shifts through the year. On June 21 that overhead point is the Tropic of Cancer, 23.44 degrees north. On December 21 it is 23.44 degrees south. On the equinoxes it is the equator.

Your latitude decides how much of the sun's daily circle sits above your horizon. Your longitude decides what time that circle passes your meridian. Put those two together with the date and you can predict sunrise and sunset to the minute, which is what the NOAA Solar Calculator does and what this page does with the same equations.

The calculation runs in four steps:

• Solar declination. How far north or south of the equator the sun is at noon on that date, in degrees.
• Hour angle. How many degrees of rotation the sun travels between rising and setting. On June 21 at 40.7 degrees north it is 113.2 degrees, which works out to 906 minutes of daylight.
• Equation of time. A correction of up to 16 minutes, because the sun is not a perfect clock and neither is Earth's orbit a perfect circle.
• Zenith correction. Sunrise is defined as the moment the upper edge of the sun touches the horizon, so the math uses 90.833 degrees instead of 90 to allow for 34 minutes of atmospheric refraction and the 16 minute radius of the sun's disc.

The equations are published in NOAA's solar calculation notes, and the same results appear in the US Naval Observatory rise and set tables. Expect agreement to within a minute or two, with the remaining gap coming from how each source rounds and which refraction model it uses.

Latitude is the biggest lever on day length

Two cities on the same date can differ by six hours of daylight. Latitude controls that, and the effect grows as you move toward the poles because a tilted planet spreads the same 24 hours of sunlight over different slices of the day.

On June 21, 2026, Miami at 25.8 degrees north gets 13 hours 45 minutes, New York City at 40.7 degrees gets 15 hours 6 minutes, and Anchorage at 61.2 degrees gets 19 hours 23 minutes. In December the order flips and the spread widens: Anchorage drops to 5 hours 27 minutes while Miami still gets 10 hours 32 minutes.

Notice how the June column compresses at the top and the December column compresses at the bottom. Near the solstice the day length curve flattens out, so a city at 40 degrees and a city at 42 degrees differ by only a few minutes. Around the equinoxes the same two cities differ by more, because the curve is at its steepest then. That is also why your own day length changes fastest in March and September, at roughly 2 minutes 40 seconds a day in New York.

The solstice is not the latest sunset

People expect the longest day and the latest sunset to land on the same date. They do not, and the gap is easy to see in a table. In New York City the earliest sunrise of 2026 is 5:24 AM, and it holds that time from June 10 through June 21. The latest sunset is 8:31 PM, and it does not arrive until June 23, two days after the solstice, then holds until June 30.

Two things cause the offset. The first is the equation of time, the up to 16 minute difference between clock noon and the moment the sun crosses your meridian. It comes from the tilt of Earth's axis and the shape of its orbit, and it drifts through the year. The second is that the sun's declination stops changing at the solstice but does not stop changing symmetrically on either side of it, so the sunrise and sunset curves peak a few days apart.

The same effect shows up in December, mirrored. New York's earliest sunset is 4:29 PM, and it runs from December 5 to December 14, which is up to 16 days before the solstice on December 21. If you want the earliest sunset for a photo shoot, the calendar date you want is not December 21.

This is also why solar noon is not at 12:00. On June 21 in New York it is 12:57 PM, which is a combination of the equation of time and the city's position near the eastern edge of its time zone. The sun is highest in the sky almost an hour after the clock says noon, and the afternoon is longer than the morning for the same reason.

Three twilights, three different jobs

Twilight is not one thing. It is a ladder of sun angles below the horizon, and each rung corresponds to a different amount of light and a different set of things you can see. The names come from what sailors and astronomers needed at each stage.

In New York on June 21, civil twilight begins 33 minutes before sunrise and ends 34 minutes after sunset. Nautical twilight starts 76 minutes before sunrise, and astronomical twilight starts 126 minutes before, at 3:18 AM. The gaps are not equal, because the sun's path crosses the horizon at a different angle at each stage.

The differences matter in practice. A runner who wants to be visible without reflective gear has until the end of civil twilight, which is roughly 30 minutes after sunset in summer at mid latitudes. A stargazer who wants a truly dark sky has to wait for astronomical twilight to end, which in New York in June is 10:37 PM and in Miami in December is 6:57 PM. Photographers call the civil twilight window the blue hour, and it is the reason a landscape shot taken 20 minutes after sunset still shows detail in the sky.

Latitude changes all three windows, and it changes the last one most. At 61 degrees north in June the sun never reaches 18 degrees below the horizon, so astronomical twilight never ends and the sky never goes fully black. Anchorage gets no astronomical darkness for roughly two months around the solstice, which is why the northern lights are a winter sight there.

High latitude summers: 16 hours and beyond

Above about 48 degrees north, summer daylight passes 16 hours. Seattle at 47.6 degrees reaches 15 hours 59 minutes on June 21, which is close enough that the extra minute shows up in the table above. Anchorage at 61.2 degrees reaches 19 hours 23 minutes, and Fairbanks at 64.8 degrees reaches 21 hours 51 minutes, with sunset at 12:48 AM and sunrise at 2:57 AM.

Push further and the day stops ending. Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, sits at 71.3 degrees north and gets 24 hours of sun from mid May to late July. That is the midnight sun, and it is a real geometric effect rather than a curiosity: the sun's declination of 23.44 degrees north exceeds the 18.7 degrees that would be needed to put it below the horizon at that latitude.

What surprises visitors is the light rather than the length. Because the sun only dips a few degrees below the horizon between sunset and sunrise, the sky keeps a glow all night, and civil twilight can last from sunset to sunrise without a break. Anchorage in June never gets past civil twilight, so streetlights stay off and bedrooms need blackout curtains.

Winter is the mirror image and it hits harder. Anchorage gets 5 hours 27 minutes on December 21, with sunrise at 10:14 AM and sunset at 3:41 PM. Fairbanks gets under 4 hours. The short day is one reason seasonal affective disorder is more common at high latitudes, and the reason a lunchtime walk becomes the main source of daylight for people who work indoors.

Clock time versus sun time

Every time zone is 15 degrees of longitude wide, which is one hour of Earth's rotation. That is a tidy theory and a messy practice. A zone can be far wider than 15 degrees, and everyone inside it shares one clock, so the sun's position at 7:00 AM varies by more than an hour from one edge of a zone to the other.

New York and Michigan share the Eastern zone, but Michigan sits about 10 degrees further west, so its sunrise comes roughly 40 minutes later on the same date. That is a longitude effect, not a latitude effect, and it is why sunrise tables are published per city rather than per state. Enter your own coordinates and the calculator handles it, because longitude feeds straight into the hour angle.

Daylight saving time adds a second layer. Clocks move forward an hour in March and back in November, and the day length does not change by a single minute either time. In New York sunrise on March 1 is 6:32 AM and sunrise on March 8 is 7:21 AM: the clocks jumped forward an hour while the sun kept its own schedule, and the seasonal drift of 11 minutes is the only reason the jump is not a full hour. That is why the first week of daylight time feels darker in the morning than the week before it.

The equation of time adds up to 16 minutes on top of that. In early November the sun runs about 16 minutes ahead of clock time, and in mid February it runs about 14 minutes behind. Combined with a zone's western edge, the gap between clock noon and solar noon can reach well over an hour, which is the practical reason a 4:30 PM sunset in December feels later than the clock suggests.

What the times are good for, and where they drift

The numbers from this calculator are good for planning a run, a photo shoot, a drive or a dog walk. They are not a substitute for looking at the sky, because three local factors shift the real moment by minutes.

• Elevation. From a hill 100 meters above the surrounding land you see the horizon about 0.5 degrees further down, which brings sunrise forward by roughly 3 to 4 minutes.
• Obstructions. Trees, buildings and mountains hide the horizon, and a treeline 5 degrees high delays visible sunrise by around 20 minutes at mid latitudes.
• Refraction. The standard 0.833 degree correction assumes average air pressure and temperature. A cold, dense morning bends light more, and the sun can appear a minute or two earlier than the table says.

For photography the useful windows are the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, when the light is low and warm, plus the 20 to 40 minutes of civil twilight on either side. In New York on June 21 that means usable light from about 4:51 AM to 9:04 PM, a span of 16 hours 13 minutes. In Miami on December 21 it shrinks to 6:38 AM through 6:00 PM.

For safety the number that matters is the end of civil twilight rather than sunset. Cyclists and runners are hard to see in the 20 minutes after sunset, and most state laws require lights on vehicles from sunset to sunrise rather than from the end of twilight. Treat sunset as the deadline, not the end of the useful day, and check the twilight row when a walk is going to run long.

Times are calculated with the standard NOAA equations and rounded to the minute. Official tables from the US Naval Observatory can differ by a minute or two because of rounding and refraction assumptions, so confirm anything safety critical against the official source.