Golden Hour and Blue Hour: How Long They Actually Last
Golden hour is not an hour. It is about 40 minutes at the equator, roughly an hour in the middle latitudes, and it stretches past two hours in northern Europe in winter. Blue hour is shorter still, usually somewhere between eight and twenty minutes. Both are defined by where the sun is, not by the clock, so the length changes with your latitude and the date.
The Definitions
Neither term has an official astronomical definition the way civil twilight does, but the boundaries used in practice are set by the sun’s altitude, measured as an angle above or below the horizon.
Golden hour runs from 4 degrees below the horizon to 6 degrees above it. In the evening the sun crosses 6 degrees on the way down, and the window closes when it reaches 4 degrees below.
Blue hour sits underneath that, from 6 degrees below the horizon to 4 degrees below. It begins where the evening golden hour ends. Both windows happen twice a day, and the morning versions run in the opposite order.
Morning blue hour in Washington DC. The sun is still below the horizon, so the blue overhead is scattered light and the color at the horizon is what is left of the beam
Below 6 degrees the sun is far enough down that direct light is gone and the sky is lit only by the upper atmosphere, which is where the blue comes from. This is also the boundary that defines civil twilight, so blue hour and the tail of civil twilight cover the same ground. The relationship between all of these boundaries is laid out in the astronomical definitions guide.
The Real Durations
These are evening windows, in minutes, calculated for the dates shown.
| Place | March equinox | June solstice | December solstice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore (1°N) | 40 gold / 8 blue | 44 / 9 | 44 / 9 |
| Miami (26°N) | 44 / 9 | 49 / 10 | 50 / 10 |
| Los Angeles (34°N) | 48 / 10 | 55 / 11 | 56 / 11 |
| New York (41°N) | 53 / 11 | 62 / 13 | 63 / 12 |
| London (52°N) | 64 / 13 | 83 / 20 | 87 / 15 |
| Stockholm (59°N) | 79 / 16 | 125 / 44 | 148 / 20 |
| Reykjavik (64°N) | 93 / 19 | none | none / 27 |
Only two rows in that table come close to sixty minutes, and the name is wrong in both directions. Singapore never gets more than about three quarters of an hour. Stockholm in December gets nearly two and a half.
The reason is the angle the sun’s path makes with the horizon. Near the equator the sun drops almost straight down, crossing those ten degrees of altitude quickly. At high latitude it moves at a shallow angle and takes far longer to cover the same vertical distance. This is the same geometry that decides how long twilight lasts, and it is why the two scale together.
The Two Places the Table Says “None”
Reykjavik in June has no golden hour and no blue hour, because the sun never drops to 4 degrees below the horizon. It skims along near the horizon all night. The light that photographers travel there for in June is real, but it is not a window, it is the whole night.
Reykjavik in December is the more interesting case. The sun reaches a maximum altitude of about 2.4 degrees on the solstice, so it never climbs to the 6 degree ceiling that would end golden hour. There is no boundary to cross. The entire four hours of daylight are golden hour light, from sunrise to sunset, which is why midwinter photographs from Iceland look the way they do.
What the Rules of Thumb Get Wrong
The advice you usually see is “the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset”. At Miami in March that overshoots by sixteen minutes on a 44 minute window, which is a third of the window spent shooting light you did not plan for. In Stockholm in December it undershoots by an hour and a half.
A related mistake is treating golden hour as ending at sunset. It does not. About a third of the evening golden hour happens after the sun is down, in the stretch between sunset and 4 degrees below, and that is often the best part of it. If you pack up at sunset you are leaving before the color peaks.
Blue hour gets the opposite treatment. It is frequently described as an hour, and it is almost never close. Ten to fifteen minutes is normal in the middle latitudes. The one place the name is nearly honest is high latitude in summer, where Stockholm gets 44 minutes in June.
There is also nothing special about the light at exactly 6 degrees or exactly 4. These are conventions that happen to line up well with how the sky looks and how cameras respond. The sky does not change state at a boundary, it changes continuously, and the numbers are a useful way to talk about where you are in that progression.
Getting the Windows for a Specific Day
The times depend on your coordinates and the date, and at high latitude they change quickly, so a fixed offset from sunset will be wrong for most of the year. Every location page lists the golden and blue hour windows for that place, morning and evening, and the free API returns them as golden_hour_morning, golden_hour_evening, blue_hour_morning and blue_hour_evening if you want to build a shot list around them.
Elevation shifts the whole set slightly later in the evening, by about five minutes per thousand meters, for the reasons covered in how elevation affects sunset times.