About SunAngle

SunAngle started the way most photographic tools do: with a missed shot. We planned a blue-hour skyline session around a phone app’s default “golden hour ends +60 minutes” rule-of-thumb, arrived confident, and watched the actual balance point come and go twenty minutes before we expected it. The lesson wasn’t “buy a better app” — it was that light planning deserves numbers you can check, not folklore.

So this site is built the way we wish every reference site were built. Every sunrise, sunset, twilight and magic-hour time you see here is computed on the spot by our own implementation of the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory’s public-domain solar formulas — the same family of equations behind serious ephemerides. We publish the formula list, the sources, and a validation table comparing our output to the official Hong Kong Observatory and Taiwan CWA 2026 tables: 43 published values, 36 exact to the minute, worst case 3 minutes. When a published value was unreadable during verification, we dropped it and said so rather than quietly claiming it.

What you’ll find here: a client-side sun calculator (city picker or raw coordinates, any date, with a day-arc chart), pre-computed monthly tables for eight cities across three continents, and guides that treat photographers as adults — we state plainly that “golden hour” and “blue hour” have no scientific definitions, show the elevation bands we chose, and link the references behind them.

Editorial standard: original prose, no invented statistics, computed numbers labeled as computed, official numbers credited to their source with a verification date. We are a planning aid, not an authority: if minutes matter contractually, use your national ephemeris. If you spot a number that looks wrong, tell us — we publish corrections.