lighthours
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Free · No account · Open source

The best light.
Right in your calendar.

lighthours calculates the daily golden hour and blue hour times for any place on earth – and delivers them as a calendar you subscribe to once and never think about again.

Create calendar

Why these hours matter

Golden hour

Just after sunrise and before sunset the sun sits low. Light turns soft, warm and directional – skin tones flatter, landscapes gain depth, harsh shadows disappear.

Blue hour

Before and after that comes twilight: the sky glows deep blue while artificial light and remaining daylight balance out. The time for cities, architecture and mood.

Short

Together they rarely last more than an hour, and they shift every day. Having them in your calendar means planning shoots realistically – instead of arriving on set to find the light already gone.

Why the golden hour only ends after sunset

Sun altitude over the course of an evening The sun descends from six degrees above the horizon down to minus six degrees. The band below shows the phases: the golden hour runs from plus six to minus four degrees and therefore continues past sunset. Only then does the blue hour follow. +6° 0° −4° −6° Horizon Sunset Golden hour, +6° to −4° of which after sunset Blue hour, −4° to −6°

The phases are defined by the position of the sun, not by whether you can see it. Its light does not stop at sunset: it keeps lighting the atmosphere from below, and that light reaches the ground scattered. It is warm, very soft and casts no shadows. That is why the more strongly coloured part still counts as golden hour. Only at −4° does the afterglow lose its strength, the sky itself becomes the light source, and the blue hour begins.

For planning that means: until sunset the light comes from the side and models – that is the time for people and landscapes. Afterwards a warm sky remains for silhouettes and city shots, but nothing left to light a face with. Every event in the calendar therefore states sunset as well, so you know where you are within that span.

How it works

Enter a place

A city, address or postcode is enough. You never have to look up coordinates.

Pick your options

Which light phases, which period, which reminder. Fine-tune the center on the map.

Subscribe

One click and the events are in your calendar. With a subscription they keep themselves up to date.

And this is how it looks in your calendar

No app, no account – the events simply appear where you already look.

Two consecutive days in week view, each with a golden hour event Tue 4 Wed 5 18:00 19:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 18:52 – 19:58 Golden Hour (Evening) 18:54 – 20:00 Golden Hour (Evening)
Two consecutive days in Berlin: 18:52, then 18:54. Golden hour shifts by a minute or two every day – nobody keeps that in their head.
An event showing place, times and sunset Golden Hour (Evening) Bremen 20:24 – 21:39 Tuesday, 4 August Sunset 21:13 Sun above the horizon 20:24 – 21:13 Reminders 2 hours and 30 minutes before Created with lighthours
Every event states start, end, place and sunset as a reference point. Language and description come from the settings you chose when creating it.

Both figures are drawn representations. The same details appear in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook; screenshots from a real app are in the source repository.

Create calendar

Three steps – no account, no email address.

Place

Why free?

The calculation costs nothing but a little compute, and nobody owns the position of the sun. There are no accounts, no ads, no ad networks and no paywall – not later either.

Why open source?

The complete source code is open and free to use. Run lighthours on your own webspace if you like. No service that disappears one day and takes your calendars with it.

Source code on GitHub →

What about data?

No cookies, no recognition, no profiles. The only thing kept is your colour mode choice, stored locally in your browser. Fonts are served from this server and place lookups run through the backend, so your search terms reach OpenStreetMap without your IP address. Map tiles are loaded by your browser directly from openstreetmap.org once you have picked a place. The number of active calendars is counted anonymously: only a hash of the calendar settings is stored. Visitor numbers come from a cookieless measurement on a server of our own, without IP address and without recognition.

Do the times look wrong to you? Wrong times are the one fault I cannot find on my own – I cannot check every place on earth. If something looks off, please tell me. Report a discrepancy →

Do you like lighthours?

The project is free and stays free. No ads, no accounts, no paywall. If it helps you, you can buy a coffee – but there is no need.

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