Free tool
Sunrise, Sunset & Daylight Hours
The light you actually get, for your region and date.
Sydney / NSW coast · 21/6/2026
Sunrise
07:00
Sunset
16:53
Civil dawn
06:32
Civil dusk
17:21
Daylight on this date
9h 54m
Solar noon 11:56 — the turnaround for west-facing pitches and the deadline for the last km of track. Usable camp light runs a few minutes past sunrise to a few minutes before sunset; civil dawn and dusk are the honest paddock-and-tea hours.
All calculations run on our servers from the values you enter — nothing is stored.
Please note — These times are planning estimates for open horizons and are not for navigation or safety-critical timing. Terrain can hide the sun well before the listed sunset, remote trips carry real darkness, and every walk into the hills should still include a headtorch, a margin, and the judgment to turn back while there is light.
Trip plans go wrong in the margins of the day. The four-hour return walk booked at ten on a January morning is a two-hour scramble with a headtorch in June. Because the same route lives under a completely different amount of light. This tool puts the light on the plan before the plan meets reality.
Pick one of ten Australian regions, enter a date. And you get sunrise, sunset, the start and end of civil twilight, solar noon, and the total daylight in hours and minutes. The maths is the standard solar-position calculation used by almanacs, run on the server from the region's latitude and longitude.
Civil twilight gets its own line because camping decisions hinge on it. That twenty-five to thirty-five minute band after sunset is when the camp kitchen actually gets built, when the last fire is lit and when the walk back from the beach is still comfortable. It is light, just not sun.
One caveat up front: regions stand in for exact sites, and time zones bend the answer across wide states. The tool is accurate to around ten minutes in most cases, which is plenty for planning and not intended for navigation or safety timing.
How the times are calculated
The sun's position on any date is set by two numbers. Its declination swings between twenty-three degrees north and south through the year. The equation of time is the small drift between clock and sun, caused by Earth's elliptical orbit and tilted axis. Both come from a standard polynomial fit that matches published almanac values closely.
From those, the tool finds the hour angle — the sun's angular distance from noon when it reaches the horizon. The angle used is ninety point eight three three degrees, not ninety. The sun's disc has size, and the atmosphere bends its light. So the last sliver of sun stays visible slightly after the geometric line is crossed.
The final step is the clock. The computed times are converted to the region's standard time zone, which is why Perth and Sydney days look so different on paper. Tick the daylight-saving box and everything shifts an hour later, which is the whole story of an eastern summer evening: still golden at eight.
A worked example
The winter solstice on the NSW coast. Sydney, twenty-first of June: sunrise at about six fifty-nine, sunset at about four fifty-three, and total daylight of nine hours and fifty-four minutes. Civil twilight runs from roughly six thirty in the morning to five twenty in the evening.
Read that as a trip plan and the shape of the day changes. The usable light window for a six-hour loop walk is really seven thirty to four. Because the first and last hours of any June day are doing something else. Breaking camp, or already breaking the rules for daylight margins.
Now the same campsite at Christmas: about fourteen and a half hours of daylight, sunset near eight in the evening with the daylight-saving shift. The identical plan that was tight in June now finishes with a swim in it. Same site, same route, and the sun is the entire difference.
Planning around the numbers
Run the tool for the first morning of the trip and the last one, not just a mid-trip average. A two-week walk that starts in late May and ends in early July loses or gains several minutes of day every single morning. And the last day is the one where a slow group meets the dark.
Work backwards from sunset for every activity with a finish line. Take the sunset time, subtract the time the activity needs, subtract the return margin, and that is the real start time. Not the clock hour you originally pencilled in. Golden hour photography and fishing both live in the last hour of light; bivy set-up lives before civil twilight ends.
Use the region as your own coordinates when you can. If you know the camp's latitude and longitude, picking the nearest listed region keeps the error small. Because most of the remaining spread comes from the time zone boundary rather than the site itself.
Reading the result panel
Total daylight is the headline planning number: it bounds everything the day can hold. The gap between dawn and sunrise, and between sunset and dusk, is the soft-light window. Real illumination, low angles, cold colours, and the last honest time to see the ground under your feet without a torch.
Solar noon is the quiet number that explains the odd ones. When solar noon lands at one twenty in the afternoon, morning and afternoon do not feel symmetric, the tide of light tilts late, and a walk planned on equal halves will run unevenly. It also tells you which side of any hill the afternoon shade falls.
Compare regions across a trip that crosses the map. A flight from Melbourne to Darwin in June moves you from about nine and a half hours of daylight and a cold dark at five to better than eleven and a half, with twilight bleeding past six thirty. The same evening routine needs different assumptions in the two places, and the numbers say so plainly.
The headtorch rule
Whatever the tool says for sunset, plan every camp activity to finish inside civil twilight and always carry a working headtorch. Twilight ends, hills block the last light, and a broken plan in the dark is the one thing a sunrise table cannot prevent for you.
How close are these times?
The astronomical model itself is good to a few minutes across the year. Region centroids add the next layer of error. A camp an hour's drive east or west of the region's reference point shifts its sunrise by up to fifteen minutes. Because the sun moves fifteen degrees of longitude every hour. Wide states like WA feel this most.
Daylight saving is the human layer, and it is applied as a flat plus-one when you tick the box. Start and end dates differ by state and change occasionally. So check the current rules for your state if the trip straddles an October or April switch weekend.
Hills, buildings and the horizon itself are last-word factors the maths cannot see. A camp in a gorge sees the sun later and loses it earlier than the table says, sometimes by thirty minutes at each end. The published times describe the flat, open-horizon day; your valley borrows from it or lends against it.
The formula
Sunrise and sunset = solar noon ± the hour angle at which the sun's centre crosses the horizon, corrected for refraction
- Solar noon
- The moment the sun is at its highest for your longitude and the date — rarely 12 o'clock on the clock, sometimes an hour away from it.
- Hour angle
- How far from noon the sun sits when it reaches the horizon. Doubling that span gives the length of the day.
- 90.833 degrees
- The angle used for the visible horizon: the sun's disc radius plus atmospheric refraction, which bends the last light over the horizon.
Approximate daylight by region and season
| Region | June solstice | December solstice |
|---|---|---|
| Darwin / Top End | 11 h 25 m | 12 h 50 m |
| Cairns / Wet Tropics | 11 h 05 m | 13 h 10 m |
| Brisbane / SE QLD | 10 h 25 m | 13 h 50 m |
| Sydney / NSW coast | 9 h 55 m | 14 h 25 m |
| Hobart / Tasmania | 9 h 00 m | 15 h 20 m |
Key terms
- Civil twilight
- The period after sunset (and before sunrise) when the sun is within six degrees below the horizon — bright enough for most camp tasks without artificial light.
- Solar declination
- The latitude at which the sun sits directly overhead at noon. Its annual swing between the tropics is what creates seasons and changing day length.
- Equation of time
- The seasonal mismatch between sundial noon and clock noon, worth up to about sixteen minutes either way through the year.
- Hour angle
- The sun's angular distance from solar noon at any moment; its value at the horizon sets sunrise and sunset.
- Golden hour
- The soft, warm light just after sunrise and before sunset. Photographers chase it; campers mostly just need it to finish the fire.
Pro tips
- Check the last day of the trip first — the longest walk home deserves the shortest day's honest numbers.
- In winter, plan returns to finish thirty minutes before sunset, because shaded slopes and gorges lose light well before the table's flat-horizon time.
- Tick daylight saving for the eastern states from October to April, and remember Queensland and the Northern Territory never shift.
- Use the sunrise time backwards for dawn starts: break camp by the previous evening and eat breakfast in the first hour of light, not the dark before it.
× Common mistakes
- Planning a June day around December light because the season feels obvious in your head.
- Assuming solar noon is clock noon and packing lunch for eleven thirty in a one-twenty afternoon.
- Forgetting the region's time zone on a trip that crosses state borders in one long day.
- Treating twilight as dark — and being surprised that the tent went up fine after sunset all along.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is this sunrise and sunset calculator?+
For the region centre points, typically within about ten minutes of published almanac times, with most of that residual coming from atmospheric conditions and horizon shape rather than the maths. For a camp far from the listed region, add a few minutes per degree of longitude either side of the reference point.
Why is my sunset so late when the day only has ten hours?+
Because clock time and solar time disagree. Time zones stretch across wide slices of longitude, so a site at the western edge of its zone. Adelaide and Melbourne both show this — sees solar noon arrive past midday and sunset slide late. Daylight length, unlike the clock numbers, is a property of latitude alone.
Do I need to tick the daylight saving box?+
Tick it whenever civil time in the region is running one hour ahead of standard time. Roughly October to April in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT. Leave it alone for Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, which do not shift their clocks at all.
What is the difference between civil, nautical and astronomical twilight?+
They mark the sun's depth below the horizon: civil ends at six degrees, nautical at twelve, astronomical at eighteen. Campers mostly care about civil, because that is where usable ambient light ends. Astronomical twilight ending is what dark-sky stargazers wait for, which in summer can be late.
Can I use this to time a tide, a solar panel or a photo setup?+
For photo light and solar charging windows, yes — the golden-hour and daylight figures are the right planning numbers. For tides, use the official tide tables. Water level and moon position have nothing to do with sunrise geometry, and a model of the sun will never predict the sea.
How we built this calculator
- Written by
- Track & Canopy Editorial Team — Trip Planning Desk
- How we calculate
- Times are computed from the standard simplified solar-position equations — the same declination and equation-of-time formulation published for NOAA's solar calculator — applied to reference coordinates for each region and their official standard time zones.
- Sources & standards
- Last reviewed
- 15 October 2026
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Track & Canopy — Practical gear advice for Australian conditions. Estimates are planning aids, not engineering advice.