How Daylight Now works
Daylight Now turns a place and a date into three useful answers: sunrise, sunset and the time between them. This guide explains what those answers mean, where they come from and when you should treat them with care.
From a search to a result
Start with the calculator and enter a city, postcode or named place. The search uses OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to find locations in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland and Australia. A city result represents a mapped point, not every address within that city. Choose the suggestion that matches your intended place; similarly named towns may be far apart.
The optional current-location button asks your browser for permission. When you allow it, the calculation uses the device coordinates; the displayed name describes the nearby locality. You can use the search box instead without granting location access.
Daylight Now sends the coordinates and selected date to Open-Meteo’s forecast API, requesting sunrise and sunset with an automatically selected time zone. The available dates are limited by that service. This implementation is not a full historical archive or an unlimited future calendar. If a date cannot be returned, try today or another nearby date.
Reading the three answers
Sunrise and sunset use the selected place’s local clock, even if you are viewing the site from a different time zone. The zone name beneath the result helps you confirm which clock to use. Daylight hours measure elapsed time from sunrise to sunset; they do not measure how many hours the sky will be cloudless.
Example, not a live forecast: a sunrise of 6:30 AM and sunset of 7:45 PM gives 13 hours and 15 minutes of daylight. If you start an activity at 5:00 PM, the daylight remaining until that sunset is 2 hours and 45 minutes—not the full daily total.
Why the sky may look different
The standard sunrise and sunset definition concerns the Sun’s upper edge reaching an unobstructed horizon. A hill, a building or trees can hide the Sun earlier. Atmospheric refraction also changes its apparent position. These are calculated event times, not observations from a camera at your exact viewpoint. NOAA discusses these limitations in its solar calculation notes.
Twilight extends visible light before sunrise and after sunset. The U.S. Naval Observatory’s definitions distinguish civil, nautical and astronomical twilight. Daylight Now currently displays sunrise and sunset, not separate twilight boundaries or a guaranteed time of darkness.
When a result needs another check
- High-latitude locations: during parts of the year there may be no sunrise or sunset on a particular date. Do not interpret a missing result as an ordinary day of zero length.
- An unexpected clock time: check the place, date and time-zone label before comparing with a different website. A nearby location or a different date is a different calculation.
- An unavailable lookup: searches and calculations need an internet connection and working third-party services. The explanatory guides remain readable without running a search.
About the site and its sources
Daylight Now is a free daylight lookup and planning guide. It is not an official observatory or a weather-warning service. Its guides explain the tool and use clearly labeled illustrative examples; they do not claim that example times apply to a real place today.
Location data: © OpenStreetMap contributors. Sunrise and sunset data: Open-Meteo. For details about how lookup information is handled, read the privacy notice.