Day and night world map

Where on Earth is it daytime right now? The shaded part of the map is in darkness, with twilight fading in at its edge. The ☀ marks the spot where the sun is directly overhead. The map updates every minute.

Right now around the world

Why the shape changes

The line between day and night — the terminator — is always a circle around the Earth, but on a flat map it looks like a wave. Around the March and September equinoxes the sun is over the equator, the line runs almost straight from pole to pole, and every place gets about 12 hours of daylight. Around the June solstice the sun is over the Tropic of Cancer: the Arctic stays lit all day and the Antarctic stays dark, and in December it is the other way round.

The darkest band is full night. Between the sunlit side and full night are the three stages of twilight: civil (the sun up to 6° below the horizon — still light enough to be outside), nautical (to 12°) and astronomical (to 18°), after which the sky is fully dark.

The point where the sun is overhead moves west by 15° of longitude an hour — one time zone — and up and down between the tropics over the year.

Land outlines: Natural Earth (public domain), 1:110m. Sun position: NOAA's solar equations, checked against the US Naval Observatory. City times: IANA time zone database.