Sun Position — where the sun is right now, from your location
This sun position calculator works out exactly where the sun sits in your sky at this moment: its compass direction, how high it is above the horizon, and where it will be through the rest of the day. Give it coordinates and it also returns sunrise, sunset, solar noon, day length, golden hour and the full twilight timeline for any date you choose — past or future. Nothing is looked up from a server. The astronomy runs in your browser from your latitude, longitude and the clock, which is why it keeps working with no signal.
What sun position actually means
Azimuth — the sun's compass direction
Azimuth is the bearing of the sun measured clockwise from north: 0° is north, 90° east, 180° south, 270° west. It is the number you need when you want to know which window the light will come through, or which way to point a camera. Sunrise is only due east and sunset only due west at the equinoxes. The rest of the year the sun rises and sets well north or south of those points, and the swing gets more extreme the further you are from the equator — near the summer solstice at high latitudes the sun can rise north of east and set north of west.
Altitude — how high the sun sits
Altitude is the angle above the horizon, from 0° at the horizon to 90° directly overhead. Overhead is only possible within the tropics; from the UK the midday sun peaks around 62° in June and barely 15° in December. Negative altitude means the sun is below the horizon, and those negative numbers are how twilight is defined. The Sun Altitude readout gives you the live figure, and the arc below the compass draws the whole day so you can see how high the sun will get before it starts back down.
Reading the day's light timeline
Golden hour and blue hour
Golden hour is the stretch when the sun is low enough that its light travels a long way through the atmosphere — the blue end of the spectrum scatters away and what reaches you is warm, soft and directional, with long shadows. It runs from sunrise until the sun climbs roughly 6°, and again from about 6° down to sunset. Blue hour follows, while the sun is between 0° and about −6°: no direct light, an even cool cast, and a sky bright enough to balance against lit windows. Both windows are marked on the timeline for whichever date you pick.
Civil, nautical and astronomical twilight
The three twilights are defined purely by how far the sun has dropped below the horizon. Civil twilight runs to −6°, and there is still enough light to read or work outdoors.Nautical twilight runs to −12°, the point at which the horizon becomes too indistinct to take a sextant sight against.Astronomical twilight ends at −18°, after which the sky is as dark as it is going to get and faint objects become visible. At higher latitudes in summer the sun never falls far enough for the later stages to happen at all.
Why sunrise and sunset times change
Latitude and season
Earth's axis is tilted about 23.4° from its orbital plane, and that tilt stays pointed the same way as we go round the sun. So each hemisphere leans toward the sun for half the year and away for the other half, changing how much of the sun's daily circle sits above your horizon. On the equator the effect is tiny — near twelve hours of daylight all year. By the latitude of Edinburgh the difference between the solstices is more than nine hours, and inside the Arctic Circle it becomes total: months when the sun never sets, and months when it never rises.
Longitude and clock time
Solar noon is the instant the sun crosses your meridian, and it almost never lands on 12:00. Time zones are wide political bands, so a place on the eastern edge sees the sun cross much earlier by the clock than one on the western edge of the same zone. Daylight saving shifts it another hour. This is why the Solar Noon figure on this page is worth checking rather than assuming midday — for planning shade, shadows or a shoot, solar noon is the number that matters.
How to use sun position data
Photography and film
Work out which direction the light will come from before you travel, not after. Check whether a west-facing façade will actually catch the sunset on the date you are shooting, when the sun clears a ridge or a building, and how long you have before golden hour closes. The shadow direction readout tells you where shadows will fall, which decides where to put your subject.
Property, architecture and solar
Standing in an empty flat, the sun compass tells you which way the windows face and whether the living room gets afternoon light in winter as well as summer. The same data sizes an awning, positions a patio, or aims solar panels: panels want to face the sun's average bearing at solar noon, tilted near your latitude.
Gardening and finding direction
Full sun, partial shade and deep shade are just descriptions of how many hours of direct light a bed receives — check the arc for the months a plant is actually growing, not in midsummer. And if you have no compass, the sun is one: note its bearing here, face it, and you have north. It is the same reasoning behind the old shadow-stick trick, with the arithmetic already done.
How accurate is this sun position calculator?
Positions come from SunCalc, an implementation of the standard algorithms published in Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms, the reference almanacs themselves are built on. Expect sunrise and sunset within a minute or two of published tables and azimuth and altitude within about half a degree, which is well inside what photography, navigation and planning need. Where sources disagree it is usually the atmospheric refraction model. Terrain matters far more than either: a hill, a tree line or a tower block on your skyline can push the sunrise you actually see several minutes later than the astronomical one.
Your location never leaves your browser
Coordinates are used to compute the sun's position and nothing else. They are not logged, not stored and not sent to any server — there is no server in the loop once the page has loaded. The only optional network request is a reverse geocode to display a place name, and you can avoid even that by entering coordinates by hand. If you want direction on the ground too, the online compass and moon position tools work the same way.