Free tool
Sunrise and sunset calculator
Sunrise, sunset and civil twilight at any airport, in local time. The FAA defines night three different ways, and they do not start at the same time.
Times are computed for the field’s own timezone and are accurate to a minute or two, less at high latitude. They are a planning aid, not a legal source.
How this works
- Three definitions of night
- Position lights are required between sunset and sunrise. Night flight time is logged between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight. Recent night landings for carrying passengers count from one hour after sunset to one hour before sunrise. On a summer evening at high latitude the spread between the first and the second can be over an hour of legal flying that cannot be logged as night.
- What civil twilight is
- Civil twilight ends when the sun is six degrees below the horizon. At that point the brightest stars appear and you can no longer read by natural light. Civil twilight always sits outside sunrise and sunset, never inside. How far outside depends on latitude: minutes at the equator, over an hour in the far north. That gap is the reason loggable night is defined by twilight, not by sunset.
- Polar latitudes
- Above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle the sun can stay above or below the horizon for a full day. When that happens there is no sunrise or sunset to report. At high latitudes the sun crosses the horizon at a shallow angle, so the computed times are less precise: about three minutes of disagreement on sunrise, five on twilight.
Not a substitute for an official pre-flight weather briefing.