Sunrise & Sunset Calculator

Pick one of six US cities (or enter a latitude and longitude) and a date, and you'll see approximate sunrise and sunset times along with the total span of daylight in between. Those times drive a lot of planning, from outdoor activities and photography to managing energy use.

The math is a short approximation. The calculator estimates the sun's declination from the day of the year as −23.45° × cos(360/365 × (day + 10)), finds the hour angle at which the center of the sun reaches a flat horizon at your latitude (cos H = −tan(latitude) × tan(declination)), and places solar noon at 720 − 4 × longitude minutes after midnight UTC. Sunrise and sunset are solar noon minus and plus 4 minutes per degree of hour angle. It leaves out the 50 arcminutes the U.S. Naval Observatory allows for atmospheric refraction and the sun's apparent radius, and it skips the equation of time, so its times can differ from almanac times by several minutes and its day length comes out a little short.

Raw astronomy can't see your horizon, so mountains and other local terrain may shift the sunrise or sunset you actually witness. Picking the wrong city or date is the easiest way to get a result that doesn't match reality, so confirm both inputs. The times are shown in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), not your local time: subtract 4 hours for Eastern Daylight Time, 5 for Eastern Standard Time, 7 for Pacific Daylight Time, and so on.