In Longyearbyen the sun does not rise today

Today, Thursday, November 5, 2026, the sun never comes above the horizon in Longyearbyen, Norway. There is no sunrise and no sunset. At 78.22 degrees north the sun stays below the horizon for weeks around midwinter; the nearest it gets today is at 11:41 am, which is the middle of the twilight rather than a sunrise.

Sunrise time Longyearbyen

There is no sunrise in Longyearbyen, Norway today. The sun stays below the horizon for the whole 24 hours, which is what polar night means, and it will not break the horizon for a while yet. In 2026 that happens on 111 days here.

Sunset time Longyearbyen

There is no sunset in Longyearbyen, Norway today, because there was no sunrise. What the day does have is a long twilight around the middle of the day, brightest at 11:41 am, when the sun comes closest to the horizon without reaching it.

Daylight and solar noon in Longyearbyen

Daylight today is nil in the strict sense. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 11:41 am, which is 19 minutes before clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Longyearbyen sitting at 15.65 degrees east while its clock is set to Arctic/Longyearbyen, plus the equation of time, which today is 16.5 minutes ahead of mean time, plus an hour of daylight saving for part of the year.

The sun's declination today is -15.75 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. Longyearbyen is at 78.22 degrees north, inside the Arctic Circle, which is why the day here is 0h 00m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in Longyearbyen swings by 24 hours, from 0h 00m on January 1, 2026 to 24h 00m on April 19, 2026.

Sunrise and sunset in Longyearbyen month by month

The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Longyearbyen, Norway rather than for the zone as a whole. Reading down the daylight column shows the shape of the year: short days around January, long days around July.

The extremes of the year in Longyearbyen

Longyearbyen has 128 days in 2026 when the sun never sets and 111 days when it never rises. Those counts are what the horizon crossing produces at 78.22 degrees north; they are not a rounding of "about two months".

Golden hour and blue hour in Longyearbyen today

Golden hour is the stretch when the sun sits between six degrees above the horizon and four below it, which is when the light is low, warm and soft. Blue hour follows it, from four degrees below down to six, when the sun is gone but the sky still carries a blue cast. Both happen twice a day, once either side of solar noon.

Neither is literally an hour. Each band is as long as the sun takes to cross those few degrees, so it is short near the equator where the sun drops steeply and long at high latitude where it slides in at a shallow angle.

Twilight times in Longyearbyen today

Twilight is longer the further a place is from the equator, because the sun cuts down through the horizon at a shallower angle. At 78.22 degrees north it can run all night, which is why some of the cells above have no single time to give.

Solstices and equinoxes in Longyearbyen

The equinoxes are the useful sanity check on any sun calculation: on those two days every place on Earth gets close to twelve hours between sunrise and sunset. It is not exactly twelve, and the reason is the same refraction and disc-edge convention that sets the times on this page. Sunrise is timed when the upper limb appears rather than the centre, and the atmosphere bends the image of the sun up over the horizon before it is geometrically there, so both ends of the day are pushed outwards by a few minutes. The seasons page has the exact instants.

How these times are worked out

The times on this page come from the NOAA solar position algorithm, the standard reduction of the calculations in Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. The chain is short and has no fitted constants in it: the sun's mean longitude and mean anomaly at the instant, the equation of centre to get from the mean to the true position, a correction for nutation to get the apparent longitude, the true obliquity of the ecliptic, and from those two the declination and the equation of time. Sunrise and sunset are then solar noon plus and minus the hour angle at which the sun reaches an altitude of -0.833 degrees.

That number, -0.833, is doing real work. Half of it, -0.2667 degrees, is the apparent radius of the sun, because sunrise is defined by the upper edge of the disc and not its centre. The other -0.5667 degrees is mean atmospheric refraction at the horizon, which lifts the image of the sun by roughly its own diameter. Ignore both and every sunrise on this site would be three or four minutes late and every sunset three or four minutes early.

The conversion into Arctic/Longyearbyen is done through the IANA time zone database that ships inside Node, at the actual instant of the event, so daylight saving, half hour offsets and rule changes are all handled by the database rather than by an offset written down here. Longyearbyen does move its clocks: the zone runs at UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer, which is why the sunset column in the table above jumps by an hour between two adjacent months.

Questions

What time is sunset in Longyearbyen?

There is no sunset today, because the sun does not rise at all.

What time is sunrise in Longyearbyen?

There is no sunrise today. The sun never comes above the horizon.

When is golden hour in Longyearbyen today?

Golden hour does not occur in Longyearbyen today, because the sun never crosses the band.

What time does the sun set in Longyearbyen today?

It does not set today, because it does not rise. The sun stays below the horizon all day.

What time does the sun rise in Longyearbyen today?

There is no sunrise today. The sun never comes above the horizon.

How many hours of daylight does Longyearbyen get today?

None. The sun does not rise, although there is twilight around the middle of the day.

Why is solar noon in Longyearbyen not at 12:00?

Because Longyearbyen sits at 15.65 degrees east while its clock is set to a zone meridian somewhere else, and because the equation of time shifts apparent noon by up to about 16 minutes either way through the year. Today the two effects put solar noon at 11:41 am.

When is the longest day of the year in Longyearbyen?

April 19, 2026, with 24 hours of daylight. The shortest is January 1, 2026 with 0 minutes.

Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?

Yes. Every time on this page is the local clock reading in Arctic/Longyearbyen at that instant, so it already includes daylight saving when daylight saving is in force.

Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities

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