Duskly

Twilight shoot planner for real estate photos

Enter the property and the day. Get sunset, blue hour and the end of civil twilight in the property’s time zone, the best stretch to shoot, and where the sun sets. Free, no sign-up.

The address is looked up with Nominatim, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Sun times are worked out in your browser. You can also type coordinates, such as 30.2672, -97.7431.

Enter the property and a date to see sunset, blue hour and the end of twilight there.

Missed the light, or the weather did not cooperate?

Make it dusk from a daytime photo. Duskly turns a daytime exterior into twilight in about 20 seconds, and gives you the original and the disclosure wording for where you post it. Free to try at preview size.

Make it dusk

How the planner works

Each time is the moment the sun reaches an angle, not a fixed number of minutes after sunset, because that depends on where the house is and the time of year. Civil twilight ends with the sun 6° below the horizon, as the US National Weather Service defines it. Blue hour is 4° to 8° below and golden hour starts at 6° above, as timeanddate describes them.

The sun positions are worked out in your browser, and times are shown in the property’s time zone, with daylight saving on the day you pick. We checked them against timeanddate’s sunrise and sunset tables for nine places on ten dates, from Quito to Reykjavik: every sunset and end of twilight was within a minute. It does not know the weather.

Unsure whether a twilight edit needs a label? Is day to dusk allowed on the MLS?

More free tools

FAQ

About twilight shoots

From sunset to the end of civil twilight, and most of all its last part, with the sun 4° to 6° below the horizon: the sky is blue but still has colour, and the house still reads. Look up sunset and the end of civil twilight for the property’s address on the day, and arrive about an hour before sunset. Frame the shot on a tripod and switch on the lights in the rooms you want lit before the sun goes down. Shoot from sunset through civil twilight, a frame every few minutes, and keep the one where the house and the sky balance. Stop when civil twilight ends: after that the garden and roof lose their detail. The planner above gives each of those times for your address.

Civil twilight today starts at sunset where you are and ends when the sun is 6° below the horizon, so the time depends on the place and the date. Evening civil twilight, in the US National Weather Service’s words, “begins at sunset, and ends when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon.” For Austin, Texas on 7 November 2026 the planner gives sunset at 5:39 PM and the end of civil twilight at 6:04 PM, 25 minutes later. For Seattle on 21 June 2026 it gives 9:11 PM and 9:52 PM, 41 minutes. Enter an address above for any other place and date.

Blue hour has no official definition. timeanddate says the blue “is most likely to emerge when the Sun is between 4 and 8 degrees below the horizon”, which spans the end of civil twilight and the start of nautical twilight. The planner shows when the sun reaches 4° and 8° below the horizon at your address, so it works as a blue hour calculator for any location.

Golden hour has no official definition either. timeanddate puts it when the Sun is “between 6 degrees below and 6 degrees above the horizon”, so in the evening it starts with the sun 6° up and runs through civil twilight. Wikipedia’s photography definition ends it at sunset. The planner shows when the sun is 6° above the horizon at your address, and sunset.

Either works, and they look different. A front that faces the sunset catches the last direct light, and the sky behind the house in your shot is the darker side. A front that faces away is in shade, but the brightest, most colourful part of the sky sits behind the roof. If you turn a daytime photo into dusk instead, keep the sunset where it really sets: Stellar MLS Rules, Article 04.04, accept twilight photos only if “sunset/sunrise is a true reflection of where the sun rises and sets.” The planner gives the direction.

Far from the equator in summer, the sun does not get 6° below the horizon at all, so civil twilight runs from sunset to sunrise. Wikipedia gives the lowest latitude where that can happen as about 60.561°, around the summer solstice. Anchorage, Alaska on 21 June 2026 is one such night.