Privacy

What Henge Days records while you use it, and why.

What is recorded

The addresses and place names you search for, where they resolved to, and whether a building outline was found. This is how search problems get found and fixed.
For a plan along a street: the street's name, the distance between the two ends, the day, and whether the street was found. The two addresses themselves are kept only as searches, as above.
Which features you use: outline loads, calendars computed, calendar files downloaded, walls selected, tabs opened.
When you press Share, the link that was copied. When you press Copy the text in an article, which article it was. For the first page you open on each visit, the page's address and the name of the website you came from, such as google.com, without the rest of that site's address.
When a chat or social app such as Messages, Slack or WhatsApp fetches a page of Henge Days to show a preview of a link, the name of the app and the page's address. Nothing about the person who pasted the link is recorded.
When an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, or a search engine's crawler, fetches a page, the agent's name, the page's address and whether it took the page's Markdown form. Nothing about the person who asked the assistant is recorded.
For each building page viewed, the building's name, the center of its outline, its next head-on day and the dates of each wall's head-on windows in the next 12 months are kept for 60 days, so that a shared link to the page, or to one wall and date on it, shows them in its preview. For each street planned, the street's name, the coordinates of its two ends, the day, the count of walls that get the sun and the first three stops are kept the same way. Nothing about who viewed the page is kept with them.
A random id stored in your browser, so that one visit can be told apart from another. It is not linked to your name or email unless you give them in feedback.
Your browser type, the country your connection comes from, and the version of the site you were using.
Google Analytics, a service from Google, records which pages are viewed and standard visit information such as browser and country, under Google's terms. It receives the web address of each page, and the address of a building page contains the place you searched for. Henge Days does not send it your email address or anything else you type.
Anything you type into the feedback form, with the page and building you were looking at. Your email address is kept if you enter it, or if you are signed in. Each message is also emailed to the site's owner, and the owner is emailed when an account is created.

If you sign in

Your email address is stored with your account. Sign-in emails are sent by Supabase, the service that holds the account database.
The buildings and henge days you save are stored under your account, with the building outline, the wall they refer to, any note you add, and whether you marked a day as shot or missed.
If you open the calendar feed in the planner, a secret link is made for your account. Anyone who has the link can read your saved days. Each time a calendar app reads it, the time of the read is recorded. Get a new link from the planner to stop the old one.
Usage records and feedback made while signed in are linked to your account instead of only to the browser id. The owner can see which account a piece of feedback came from.
A reply from the owner to your feedback is stored with it and shown in the feedback dialog. The time you first open a reply is recorded, so the Feedback button can stop counting it as unread.
Signing out ends the link. To delete your account and everything under it, use the Feedback button and ask.

What is not recorded

Your IP address is not stored.
Your precise location is not requested. The map's locate button, if you use it, stays in your browser.
To show a cloud forecast, the coordinates of a wall and the time of its head-on minute are sent to Open-Meteo, the weather service. No account or browser id goes with them.
The address you enter in the newsletter form goes to Substack, the service that sends the Henge Days newsletter, under Substack's terms. Henge Days does not record it, and your account on Henge Days is not subscribed to the newsletter. Henge Days records that a form was sent, and whether you opened or closed the newsletter banner at the top of an article. Your browser keeps when you closed the banner, or that you subscribed, so the banner stays hidden.
No advertising, and nothing is sold or shared. Google Analytics, listed above, is the only service from another company that records visits.

How long it is kept

Usage records are kept for up to 12 months. Feedback is kept until it has been dealt with and for 12 months after that.

Questions

Use the Feedback button on any page.

Terms and accuracy

How the dates and times on Henge Days are made, what they leave out, and the terms for using them.

This page is written in plain words. It is not legal advice.

What the dates are

Every date and time on Henge Days is computed. Nobody has stood at a given building on a given date to check it.

The sun's position comes from the NOAA solar position algorithm, accurate to about a hundredth of a degree. Refraction, the bending of light near the horizon, is included. This is the most reliable part of the result.
Building outlines come from OpenStreetMap, a map drawn by volunteers. An outline can be missing, simplified, a few meters out of place, or rotated by a degree or two.
A one degree error in the direction a wall faces moves the head-on moment by about four minutes. It can move a henge window by several days.
Addresses are looked up with public geocoders: Nominatim, the US Census Bureau geocoder and Photon. A search can land on the wrong building or on a range of addresses. Henge Days shows a warning when a match is known to be approximate or shared.

What is not included

Terrain and the horizon. Sunrise and sunset here mean the sun crossing a flat horizon. Hills, other buildings and trees can block a low sun for minutes or for the whole event.
Weather. The cloud figures shown for the next ten days are forecasts from Open-Meteo for that minute. A forecast can be wrong on the day. Haze, fog and smoke are not shown.
Access to the place you would stand: closures, traffic, construction, private property and local rules.
Clock times use the time zone of the building's location from the IANA time zone database (the standard list of world time zones), with daylight saving time applied. Check the time zone if the building is near a time zone border.

No warranty

Henge Days and everything it shows are provided as is. There is no warranty of any kind, express or implied, that the information is accurate, complete, or fit for any purpose.

Your responsibility

Check a location yourself before you rely on a date, travel to it, or plan a shoot around it. You are responsible for your own safety, for having the right to be where you stand, and for your own costs. Do not stand in a road to take a picture.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, the operator of Henge Days is not liable for any loss, injury, damage, expense or disappointment that arises from using the information on this site. This applies whether the information turns out to be accurate or not. It includes travel and booking costs and a missed sunrise or sunset.

Changes to the service

Henge Days can change, give different results, or stop at any time, without notice. Results for a building can change when its outline is edited in OpenStreetMap.

Map and address data

Building footprints are © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Geocoding is by Nominatim, Photon and the US Census Bureau, and the basemap is by OpenFreeMap. Each of these services has its own terms.

Acceptable use

The Henge Days API is private and serves only the pages of this site. Do not scrape the site, call the API from scripts or other programs, or download results in bulk.

Questions

Use the Feedback button on any page.

Admin Dashboard

What needs a look since your last visit, then the site's health, where visitors come from, what they do, the feedback and accounts, and what Cloudflare and Supabase are costing.

Planner

Your buildings, with the map, the walls and the days you plan to be there.

Articles · October 30, 2026

Map of Urbanna, Virginia, from the west end of Old Virginia Street to the waterfront, with the James Mills Storehouse and the Old Middlesex County Courthouse outlined in black and labeled 1 and 2. — Urbanna on Friday, November 6, 2026, in Along a street. The two buildings in the list are outlined in black. Pink marks the walls along Old Virginia Street that the rising or setting sun lines up with that day, and orange the walls the low sun lines up with. Christ Church is 4 kilometers southeast.

Urbanna Oyster Festival, November 6 and 7, 2026: when the sun lights the old buildings of Urbanna, Virginia

When to photograph the James Mills Storehouse, the Old Middlesex County Courthouse and Christ Church during the Urbanna Oyster Festival, Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, 2026: sun times, which walls get light, and where to stand.

For November 6 to 7, 2026.

The 69th Urbanna Oyster Festival fills the town of Urbanna, Virginia, on Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, 2026. Urbanna is a small town in Middlesex County, on Urbanna Creek near where it meets the Rappahannock River. Its oldest buildings date from the 1700s, when it was a tobacco port. This guide gives the hours when the sun lights them on the two festival days, and where to stand. Post what you shoot with #HengeDays, with the building's name and the date.

Every time in this guide is Eastern Standard Time. The clocks went back on Sunday, November 1. Each entry gives the wall, the hours of light, where to stand and what is in the way, and a button opens the wall in Henge Days.

The festival days

Friday, November 6: the festival runs from 10 AM to 8 PM. The town is closed to vehicles from 5 PM to 9 PM for the Fireman's Parade, which runs from 7 PM to 8 PM, after dark.
Saturday, November 7: the festival runs from 9 AM to 5 PM, and the town is closed to vehicles from 9 AM to 8 PM. The Oyster Festival Parade starts at 2 PM.
Entry is free. Parking, the VIP areas and the beer and wine area can charge a fee.
The festival organizers report more than 50,000 visitors in a town of about 500 people.

The sun on November 6 and 7

Sunrise is at 6:36 AM on Friday and 6:37 AM on Saturday, in the east-southeast, at 110°.
Sunset is at 5:02 PM on Friday and 5:01 PM on Saturday, in the west-southwest, at 250°.
The sun is under 6° from sunrise to 7:14 AM and from 4:25 PM to sunset. At 11:49 AM it is due south and 36° up, its highest of the day.
A wall that faces north gets no direct sun on these days. The fronts of the James Mills Storehouse and the Old Middlesex County Courthouse both face north, toward their streets. They stay in shade all day, with even light at any hour.
The west ends of both buildings take the sun from 11:48 AM. Their best light is from 3 PM until a building to the southwest blocks the sun, at about 3:35 PM at the storehouse and 3:45 PM at the courthouse.

A plan for the two days

6:36 AM: sunrise.
6:41 AM: at Christ Church, 4 kilometers southeast of the town, the sun clears the horizon and lights the east end and the south wall, with no building in the way.
7:41 AM: the sun clears the buildings east of the James Mills Storehouse and reaches its east end, 11° up.
10 AM on Friday and 9 AM on Saturday: the festival opens.
11:48 AM: the sun passes due south and moves onto the west ends of the storehouse and the courthouse.
2 PM on Saturday: the Oyster Festival Parade.
3 PM to 3:45 PM: the low afternoon sun, 20° to 13° up, on the west ends of the storehouse and the courthouse.
4:25 PM to 5:02 PM: at Christ Church, the sun is under 6° and lights the west entrance 23° to 18° off square.
7 PM on Friday: the Fireman's Parade.

Two buildings in the town

On the festival days the sun meets these walls at an angle. Their rows in the Henge days list point to the March evenings when the sunset lines up with them.

1 James Mills Storehouse

Urbanna, Virginia

Wall: west, facing 269°
Sun: The sun reaches the west end at 11:48 AM. From 3 PM to about 3:35 PM it is 20° to 14° up and 40° to 33° off the wall. After that a building to the southwest, whose height the check estimated, stands higher than the sun. The porch front faces north and gets no direct sun in November. The east end has the sun from 7:41 AM to 11:47 AM.
Leaves: Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November, so the festival days fall at or just before the peak.
Where to stand: Stand on the lawn on the west side, off the gravel drive, and frame the west gable end with its loft door. The porch steps are at the left. In the morning, stand on the east side for the east end.
Clear view: Clear. No building in the map data rises above the sun (15.4° up) in its direction.

James Mills was the factor, or local agent, of a British trading company, and this was his storehouse, built in the mid-1760s. Its other names are the Old Tobacco Warehouse and the Scottish Factor Store. It is a story and a half of Flemish bond brick on a raised basement, with a six-bay porch across the north front. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities bought it in 1938, and it was the town library for many years. The town bought it in 1997 for its visitor center. The museum inside holds a 1755 Mitchell Map. From May through November it opens Thursday to Saturday from 11 AM to 4 PM and Sunday from 1 PM to 4 PM.

Map of James Mills Storehouse in Henge Days, with the west wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 269°, toward the sunset on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Thu, Mar 18 to Sat, Mar 20, 20273 evenings · best Thu, Mar 18

7:14 PM Henge sunset, sun on the horizon W 269° wall

Its row in the Henge days list, with the time of the head-on moment on the best day. Save keeps that day in your planner, which can send it to your calendar app. Saving asks you to sign in with an email link; there is no password.

A year of head-on days for each wall of James Mills Storehouse — The year for every wall of the building. Each row is a wall; the colored runs are its henge, golden and low-sun days.

Open this wall in Henge Days

2 Old Middlesex County Courthouse

Urbanna, Virginia

Wall: west, facing 270°
Sun: The sun reaches the west end at 11:48 AM. From 3 PM to about 3:45 PM it is 20° to 13° up and 41° to 33° off the wall. After that a building to the southwest, whose height the check estimated, stands higher than the sun. The north side, with the vestibule and the door, gets no direct sun in November.
Leaves: Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November, so the festival days fall at or just before the peak.
Where to stand: Stand on the Virginia Street sidewalk at the west corner of the low brick wall (the map labels the street Old Virginia Street), and look along the north side to the west end. Stay outside the wall. The yard belongs to the Woman's Club.
Clear view: Clear. No building in the map data rises above the sun (15.4° up) in its direction.

Work on the courthouse started in 1745, and it served Middlesex County from 1748 to 1852. The local Committee of Safety met here during the Revolution. Later it served several congregations. In 1948 Christ Church Parish passed it to the Middlesex County Woman's Club, which still uses it. Only the brick walls are from the 1700s. The pointed Gothic windows, the entrance vestibule on the north side and the apse at the east end came later. It is at 210 Virginia Street and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

Map of Old Middlesex County Courthouse in Henge Days, with the west wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 270°, toward the sunset on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Thu, Mar 18 to Sat, Mar 20, 20273 evenings · best Thu, Mar 18

7:15 PM Henge sunset, sun on the horizon W 270° wall

Its row in the Henge days list, with the time of the head-on moment on the best day. Save keeps that day in your planner, which can send it to your calendar app. Saving asks you to sign in with an email link; there is no password.

A year of head-on days for each wall of Old Middlesex County Courthouse — The year for every wall of the building. Each row is a wall; the colored runs are its henge, golden and low-sun days.

Open this wall in Henge Days

Christ Church, 4 kilometers southeast

Christ Church stands on Church Lane (Route 638), north of Route 33, about 4 kilometers southeast of the town center. Its parish built it in the 1720s, of Flemish bond brick, 60 feet by 33 and a half feet. It was abandoned after the Revolution, when the Church of England lost its standing in Virginia, and only the walls survived. It was restored in 1843, when the vestibule on the west end was added. It is the Episcopal parish church and the chapel of Christchurch School. Lewis "Chesty" Puller and Andrew Jackson Montague are buried in the churchyard.

The west end, with the 1843 vestibule, faces 267°. It has the sun from 11:41 AM to sunset. From 4:25 PM to 5:02 PM the sun is under 6° and 23° to 18° off square to it.
The south wall faces 177° and has the sun all day. It is square to the wall at 11:40 AM. Its glazed headers show best in the slanting light of the early morning and the late afternoon.
The east end faces 87° and has the sun from sunrise to 11:40 AM. At sunrise the sun is 23° off square to it.
No building stands between these walls and the sun. Trees stand around the churchyard, and the check does not include them.
Henge Days found no posted visiting hours for the churchyard. Ask the parish before you go, and stay off the grounds of Christchurch School next door.
Open Christ Church in Henge Days to see its walls and the days in March when the sunset lines up with the west end.

Weather

At the start of November, Norfolk, the nearest long weather record, averages a high of 66°F and a low of 51°F. Expect near 50°F at sunrise.
The sky is clear, mostly clear or partly cloudy about 61% of the time at the start of November, and overcast or mostly cloudy the rest.
Check the forecast from the National Weather Service office in Wakefield the evening before. A day saved to your planner shows the cloud forecast for its minute from 10 days ahead.

Leaves

Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November, so the festival days fall at or just before the peak.

How the list was made

Henge Days computed every building outline from OpenStreetMap within 400 meters of three points in Urbanna and within 300 meters of Christ Church. It looked for walls where the sun lines up with the wall within 6 degrees of the horizon on November 6 or 7, and then traced the sun's path from each wall to find the buildings in the way.

Six walls line up. Four of them, at the Urbanna Branch of the Middlesex County Public Library, Mi Jalisco, Urbanna Market IGA and an unnamed building, stand behind other buildings at sunrise. The sun reaches only 4 of the 13 meters of the fifth, a State Farm office. The sixth is a building of Christchurch School, a private school, and the only place to stand for it is on the school's grounds. Since none of them made a pick, this guide lists the oldest buildings in and near the town and gives the hours when the sun reaches them at any height.

Rosegill, Lansdowne and the Wormeley-Lee-Montague Cottage are left out because they are private homes. Urbanna Baptist Church, built in 1892, is left out because Henge Days could not confirm which way its front faces.

Few buildings in Urbanna have a height in OpenStreetMap. Where one is missing, the check assumes a height from the kind of building, and the entries say where that sets the end of the light. Trees and hills are not part of the check, and the times assume a level horizon, which holds on the flat ground of the Middle Peninsula. Every time comes from the Henge Days engine, in Eastern Standard Time.

How to read each entry

Each entry shows the building as Henge Days shows it. The map marks the building's outline from OpenStreetMap, gives every wall its compass bearing, and highlights the wall in the entry. Below it are the wall's row from the building's Henge days list, with a Save button that keeps the best day in your planner, and a year of head-on days for every wall.

Plan a trip of your own

Search for a building, or tap one on the map, and pick the wall you want lit.
The Henge days list shows the next days the sun lines up with that wall, at the horizon or in golden light, with the time.
The Today tab shows the sun's path for one day and when it is square to each wall. Check the cloud forecast there before you go.
Save a day to your planner to get a reminder and a calendar entry, or use Along a street to find every wall that lines up along one road.

Post your picture from the festival weekend with #HengeDays.

Find a wall in Henge Days Open your planner

Sources

Features

What Henge Days does, part by part, with a live example for each. Everything runs from a building's real outline and the sun's computed position.

Henge days for any building

Type an address or a landmark. Henge Days finds the building's outline in OpenStreetMap, gives every wall a compass bearing, and works out when the sun's bearing matches it. The Henge days tab lists every window for the next 12 or 24 months in date order: henge days with the sun on the horizon, golden light under 6°, low sun under 15°. Filters pick the tiers and sunrise or sunset. Each row has the best day, the time, a calendar event and a Save button.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond · Flatiron Building, New York

Today

The Today tab shows the chosen day for the selected wall: a timeline of when the sun strikes it and how squarely, the head-on minute, and the week ahead. The day can be any day you choose. A cloud forecast from Open-Meteo sits beside each day within 10 days.

The museum today

Along a street

Two ends of one street, the street's name or route number, and a day. Henge Days stitches the street's OpenStreetMap ways into one path, keeps the walls within 60 m that face the road, and lists the ones the sun reaches that day in the order you pass them. Each stop has the distance from the first end, the side of the road, the time the sun is square to the wall or at its best angle, the tier, and the wall. The map draws the street and marks each lit wall. A plan covers up to 5 km of one street.

US 17 through Tappahannock, December 12 · Main Street, Mathews, October 24 · Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, November 17

Planner

Sign in with an email link to save buildings and days. The planner keeps an agenda of your saved days in date order, with a countdown, the cloud forecast, and a note for each. The shot card for a day gives a stand point 1.5 wall lengths back from the wall, links to open it in Apple Maps or Google Maps, an arrive-by time, and a Shot or Missed mark afterwards. The agenda also lists days coming up at your saved buildings that you have not saved yet.

Open the planner

Calendar feed and calendar files

Any row downloads a calendar event with the stand point in its location. The planner also offers a private calendar feed: subscribe once in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook and every saved day appears and stays current. The feed link can be rotated at any time.

Henge pages

A set of pages, one per building or street, with every head-on date and time for the year ahead written out on the page, computed when the site is built. They are for reading, for search engines and for AI assistants, and each has a Markdown form and a JSON file. The buildings and streets on the site's examples are there to start.

Henge pages

The Share button copies a link to the building, the selected wall and the map view. Pasted into a message or a post, the link shows the building's name and its next henge day, or the wall and date of the row you selected.

A link to one row at the museum

Open data and accuracy

Building outlines come from OpenStreetMap. Addresses are looked up with Nominatim, Photon and the US Census Bureau geocoder. Sun positions come from the NOAA solar position algorithm, computed in your browser for every day in the range. Cloud forecasts come from Open-Meteo. None of the dates are checked on the ground: hills, trees, other buildings and weather are not included, so treat each one as a plan to confirm before you travel. Terms and accuracy has the detail.

The day the sun hits that wall head-on.

Light you can put in the calendar

Find a wall's days

Drive a street for the light

Plan the shot

Flatiron Building

Live right now

Three streets, live

Church Lane, Tappahannock, VA

Main Street, Mathews, VA

North Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, VA

What is a henge day?

How it works

Privacy

What is recorded

If you sign in

What is not recorded

How long it is kept

Questions

Terms and accuracy

What the dates are

What is not included

No warranty

Your responsibility

Liability

Changes to the service

Map and address data

Acceptable use

Questions

Admin Dashboard

Planner

Release notes

Urbanna Oyster Festival, November 6 and 7, 2026: when the sun lights the old buildings of Urbanna, Virginia

The festival days

The sun on November 6 and 7

A plan for the two days

Two buildings in the town

1 James Mills Storehouse

2 Old Middlesex County Courthouse

Christ Church, 4 kilometers southeast

Weather

Leaves

How the list was made

How to read each entry

Plan a trip of your own

Sources

Features

Henge days for any building

Today

Along a street

Planner

Calendar feed and calendar files

Henge pages

Share links

Open data and accuracy