Planning a photo shoot or a night of stargazing

Light outdoors is set by the Sun and the Moon, and both can be worked out ahead for any place and date: when the light is low and warm, when the sky turns deep blue, and when it’s dark enough for the Milky Way. These tools do it in your browser, offline once the page has loaded.

1. The place

In Sun Times, type a city into Place and pick it from the list; that sets the Time zone too. For a viewpoint, a beach or a field away from towns, find it on a map and paste the map link, a grid reference or a geocache’s coordinates into the Coordinate Converter. Copy the decimal degrees it gives, such as 54.60, -3.13, into Place. The time zone is taken from the nearest city in Sun Times’ list, which the message names; near a border, check it’s the place’s own.

A few kilometres makes little difference to the times; hills and buildings make more. A valley loses the low Sun well before sunset, and a high ridge keeps it a little after.

2. Light for photographs

• Golden hour is while the Sun is low, under 6° above the horizon: soft, warm light with long shadows, just after sunrise and before sunset.
• Dawn (civil) to sunrise, and sunset to Dusk (civil), the Sun is just below the horizon. There’s no direct sunlight but plenty of light in the sky, and the deep blue that photographers call the blue hour comes in this time.
• Solar noon is when the Sun is highest and shadows are shortest and hardest; its height is shown with it.

For a sunrise shoot, plan to arrive by civil dawn: the sky is often at its best before the Sun appears. In the north in summer, sunset and sunrise can be only a few hours apart, and the twilight rows say when it never gets properly dark.

3. A dark sky for the stars

The sky is fully dark from Astronomical dusk to Astronomical dawn, when the Sun is more than 18° below the horizon. Between nautical and astronomical twilight the brightest stars are out but the Milky Way is still washed out. Near midsummer far from the equator there may be no astronomical night at all, and the rows say so.

The Moon matters as much as the Sun. Open Lunar Phases and pick a Month to list: the nights around a new moon are the darkest, and a full moon lights the landscape (good for a night scene, poor for faint stars). Lunar Phases doesn’t give moonrise, so a waxing moon that has already set by late evening, or a waning one that hasn’t yet risen, can still leave a dark few hours.

4. Putting it together

For example, for a night in the Lake District in October 2025: Lunar Phases lists the new moon on 21 October at 13:25 (UK time). In Sun Times, with Place 54.60, -3.13, Time zone Europe/London and Date 2025-10-21, sunset is at 17:59, golden hour runs from 17:08 to sunset, and astronomical dusk is at 19:59. So: a sunset shoot from about 17:00, then a dark, moonless sky for the stars from 20:00.

To choose the time of year, the table of the first of each month shows the sunrises, sunsets and daylight through the year at a glance.