About Us

Hello there.

Sun Up (www.sun-up.co.uk) was created to help people of all interests and occupations to find the sunrise and sunset times for any area of the UK (although you can also search for anywhere in the world too!).

We're lucky enough to live in one of the most magnificent countries in the world, and hundreds of thousands of people each year unpack their dusty cameras to take photos of our spectacular sunsets and sunrises.

Seeing the sun rise over the crest of a hill, or watching it disappear over the horizon of the sea is a truly remarkable event.

You might also want to use our website to find out sunset and sunrise times for other, more mundane reasons. Perhaps you want to know what time the sun disappears so that know what time your kids bedrooms go dark. Perhaps you're planning something in the dark and you want to know what's the best time to start. We'll never know why you're visiting our website, but you can trust us to bring you accurate and reliable times for dusk and dawn.

Got a website?

If you've got your own website or blog and want to include dawn and dusk times on it, then we're working on providing both a widget and api so that you can embed sunrise/sunset times right into one of your pages.

We're also working on an API, which will allow you to do whatever you want - within reason. For more details, see our API / Widget page.

How do you calculate dusk/dawn times?

The first thing we need to know to make accurate calculations is the geographic location. We derive this from using a huge database of all UK towns, cities and villages (more than 40,000 of them!) which contains all their latitude and longitude coordinates (e.g. 52.532893, -2.238932).

These coordinates are the angle which ranges from 0° at the Equator, to 90° at the poles, and can determine any possible position on earth to a very precise location.

Once we know this, then we calculate the sunrise and sunset times by passing them to a piece of code, written in the PHP Language, which will give us an array of all sorts of wonderful data, including civil, nautical and astronomical twilight times.

Luckily enough, this function is a built-in class for PHP, and all we have to do then is to separate it into something more easily readable on the website.

And there it is. We hope that it proves useful for you. Any questions, please do get in touch with us.