Sunrise Sunset Calculator

You need a place, a date and the time zone offset for that place on that date. The calculator does the astronomy from those three facts.

1. Pick a city from the list, or choose Custom place and enter the latitude and longitude.
2. Pick the date you want. The date field opens a calendar picker.
3. Pick the time zone offset for the place on that date, including daylight saving time if it applies. New York in June is UTC-4.
4. Press Calculate to see sunrise, sunset, solar noon and day length in local time.

This calculator uses the solar equations published by NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From the date it works out the solar declination, the tilt of the sun rays against the equator, and the equation of time, the gap between solar time and clock time.

Sunrise and sunset are the moments the upper edge of the sun touches the horizon. In the math that means the sun centre sits 0.833 degrees below the horizon, a standard correction covering atmospheric refraction and the radius of the sun disk. The hour angle at that height, measured from solar noon, gives sunrise before noon and sunset after it, and the time zone offset turns the UTC result into local time.

Take New York City, latitude 40.7128, longitude -74.006, on June 21, 2026, the summer solstice. The solar declination is +23.45 degrees and the equation of time is -1.33 minutes, and solar noon lands at 12:57 PM local time.

Counting back gives sunrise at 5:24 AM. Counting forward gives sunset at 8:30 PM. The day length is sunset minus sunrise, which is 15 hours 6 minutes. Published tables for New York on the same date list the same times, so the calculation matches within a minute.

Day length changes because the Earth axis is tilted about 23.44 degrees. In June the northern hemisphere leans toward the sun, so the sun rises early, sets late and climbs high at noon. In December the same places lean away, so the sun rises late, sets early and stays low. If you travel, the time zone converter turns the local sunrise time into your home time, and the date calculator counts the days to a solstice or an equinox.

At the equinoxes in March and September the declination is near zero and almost every place on Earth gets close to 12 hours of daylight. The change is fastest near the equinoxes and slowest near the solstices.

Near the poles the sun can stop rising or setting altogether. Above the Arctic Circle in summer the sun stays above the horizon all day, the midnight sun, and in winter it never rises, the polar night. The same happens in reverse around Antarctica.

The calculator reports these cases instead of inventing a time. If the sun cannot reach the horizon on that date, the result says polar day or polar night. Tromso in Norway, for example, has polar night in mid January and midnight sun in late June.