When is the light right at your location?

What the tool answers

Most golden-hour apps give you two times. On a shoot day you need four more things: which direction the light comes from, how high the sun is when the talent turns to camera, how long the window really is behind the row of houses to the west, and whether the clocks change the week you shoot. The tool puts those into one view.

The day chart shows the sun’s altitude across 24 hours on top of the light phases. Drag across it and the map shows the sun’s direction at that minute, plus the shadow of a 1.80 m person drawn to the map’s scale. The year chart shows 365 days at once — useful when you can still choose the shoot week.

How we calculate

Sunrise and sunset are the moments the top edge of the sun touches the horizon, which with average atmospheric refraction is a sun centre 0.833° below it. Golden hour here means the sun between 6° above the horizon and sunset; blue hour means the sun between 4° and 6° below. Those angles are a convention, not a law — some apps use 10° or end golden hour at −4°, which is why their times can differ by ten minutes from ours.

Positions come from the standard low-precision solar formulas (mean anomaly, equation of centre, obliquity 23.4397°), the same family NOAA’s calculator uses. Local times go through your browser’s time-zone database, so daylight saving is handled per location without a rule table of our own.

golden hour (evening) = t(sun altitude = 6°) … t(altitude = −0.833°) blue hour (evening) = t(altitude = −4°) … t(altitude = −6°) shadow length = 1.80 m ÷ tan(altitude)

Where the tool is wrong

• Terrain and buildings. The maths assumes a flat horizon. Use the obstruction slider: a four-storey building 100 m away is roughly 5°, a hill 2 km away that rises 150 m about 4°. Direct sun ends when the sun drops below that angle — often 20 minutes before the official sunset.
• Weather. Haze, a cloud bank on the horizon or wildfire smoke can end usable light long before the numbers say so. Look at the forecast cloud cover for low clouds in the west from about three days out.
• Extreme latitudes. North of about 60° the sun crosses the 6° line slowly and at a shallow angle, so a minute of error in the formula turns into several minutes of window. Treat times in Tromsø or Reykjavík as ±5 minutes.
• Free coordinates. When you drag the map somewhere without a known city nearby, the time zone is borrowed from the nearest one we know (or your browser). The tool says so under the result.

From the schedule

A typical failure: an exterior dialogue scene in Hamburg, scouted on 12 October with sunset at 18:33, scheduled as the last setup from 17:30 on Monday 26 October. The clocks went back the night before. On the day, sunset is at 17:02, the golden window starts at 16:11 — and a hotel block to the south-west, about 5° above the horizon from the camera position, ends direct sun at 16:18. The scene needs 50 minutes; the window with direct golden light was seven.

Two fixes come straight out of the tool: check the shoot date itself instead of the recce date, and enter the obstruction. Then the setup moves to the slot where the sun is still above the building, with the wide first and the close-ups after. The window goes into the schedule as a fixed block, not as a hope at the end of the day.