Sunrise and Sunset Times - 24 October 2026

What sunrise and sunset actually mark

Sunrise is the moment the Sun's upper edge first appears on the horizon, and sunset the moment that same edge disappears - not the moment the Sun's centre crosses. The atmosphere also bends light, lifting the Sun's apparent position by roughly half a degree near the horizon, so you see it rise a few minutes before it geometrically does and set a few minutes after. Both effects are included here.

That is why two almanacs can print sunrise a minute or two apart for the same city on the same day: they are answering slightly different questions - upper edge or centre, with refraction or without. Nothing is wrong with either; the convention simply has to be stated. This page uses the upper edge with standard refraction, which is the convention Indian panchangs follow.

Why your neighbours share a clock but not a sunrise

India keeps one time zone across nearly 3,000 kilometres of longitude - 68.1°E to 97.4°E - and the Sun does not. Every degree of longitude east brings sunrise four minutes earlier, so Kolkata sees the Sun well before Mumbai while both read the same hour on the clock. Latitude then decides how much the day stretches and shrinks across the year: near the equator day length barely moves, and the further north you go the wider it swings.

This is exactly why a printed sunrise table for 'India' is of no use for a muhurta. Rahu Kaal, Choghadiya, the Hora and Abhijit are all fractions of your local sunrise-to-sunset span, so they inherit every one of those minutes.

Day length, night length and solar noon

Day length is measured from sunrise to sunset, night length from sunset to the next sunrise. This page measures both as real elapsed time rather than subtracting the printed clock times - which matters wherever daylight saving is observed, because the night that contains the changeover is genuinely an hour shorter or longer than the clock suggests.

Solar noon is the instant the Sun crosses your meridian - its highest point of the day - and it is almost never twelve o'clock. Your longitude within the time zone shifts it, and the Earth's tilted, slightly elliptical orbit shifts it again by up to about a quarter of an hour either way over the year. The day-length figure also carries how much the day has gained or lost since yesterday, which peaks near the equinoxes and falls to nothing at the solstices.

The three twilights

Twilight is measured by how far the Sun's centre has dropped below the horizon, and there are three standard depths:

• Civil twilight - the Sun 6° below. There is enough light to see and work outdoors without artificial light; the brightest planets appear.
• Nautical twilight - 12° below. The horizon is still faintly visible at sea, which is what made it navigationally useful.
• Astronomical twilight - 18° below. Beyond this point the sky is fully dark for observing.
• At high latitudes a band can be missing entirely. The Sun's lowest point of the night sits at (latitude + declination - 90°), so from about 49°N in midsummer it never reaches 18° below the horizon and astronomical twilight does not occur at all - that is Paris and Vancouver, not the Arctic. Nautical twilight goes the same way from about 55°, and civil from about 61°, which is the white-night effect. The table says so rather than printing a time from another day.

Why the panchang begins at sunrise

The Hindu civil day runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight. A tithi, nakshatra or yoga is reported for the day whose sunrise it covers, and every weekday-keyed window is a division of the same span: the daytime is cut into eight equal parts for Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika, into fifteen for the muhurtas, and into eight again for the day Choghadiya.

Two of those windows are shown here because they follow from sunrise alone. Brahma Muhurta is the stretch from 96 to 48 minutes before sunrise. Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen equal daytime muhurtas, so it straddles solar noon and is about as long as one-fifteenth of your daylight - which means it is noticeably longer in June than in December.