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. 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 14, 2026

Map of Main Street in Mathews, Virginia, turned so the street runs left to right, with the walls the sun lines up with on October 24 marked in pink. — Main Street, Mathews, on October 24, 2026, in Along a street. North is to the left. Pink marks the walls the rising or setting sun lines up with that day.

Planning a photo walk with Henge Days: sunrise and sunset on Main Street, Mathews, Virginia, Saturday, October 24, 2026

Plan a morning and evening photo walk down Main Street in Mathews, Virginia, on Saturday, October 24, 2026: when the low sun lights up its shops and churches, where the buildings across the street cast them into shadow, and six buildings to save for their best light.

For Saturday, October 24, 2026.

For a few minutes after sunrise and before sunset, the light comes in nearly level. It lands square on the buildings that face it, warms brick and painted wood, and pulls long shadows from every window frame and doorway. Henge Days finds those minutes for any building. It lists the days when the rising or setting sun lines up with one of its walls, the way the sun lines up with the streets of Manhattan on Manhattanhenge, and calls them henge days. This article uses Henge Days to plan one walk, on Main Street in Mathews, Virginia, on Saturday, October 24, 2026. Every step works on your own street too.

Mathews is a small county seat on the Chesapeake Bay side of Virginia's Middle Peninsula. Its Main Street runs about a kilometer south from Route 198, at the left of the map, past the Court Green, shops, churches and museums. Buildings on the west side of the street face the sunrise, and buildings on the east side face the sunset. On October 24 the sun rises at 7:22 AM and sets at 6:16 PM, and in between the farmers market fills the Court Green from 9 AM to 1 PM.

How the walk was planned

Open Along a street and enter the two ends of the street, its name and the date. For this walk the ends are Route 198 at the north end of Main Street and a point about a kilometer south, past the Maritime Museum.
Look at the map. Every wall the low sun lines up with that day is marked in pink, and the list beside it puts them in walking order, with the time the light arrives at each. Main Street has 51 on October 24.
See what is in the way. A low sun can hide behind the building across the street. For this article Henge Days also checked each of the 51 walls for buildings standing between it and the sun, and 20 have a clear view. The tables below give the result for every building with a name.
Save the mornings and evenings you want. Each building page lists the days in the year when the sun lines up with its walls. Save keeps a day in your planner, which can send it to your calendar app and shows the cloud forecast from 10 days ahead. Signing in takes only an email address.

The map and the list for this walk, on October 24 or any other day you choose:

Open this walk in Along a street

The plan for October 24

7:20 AM: start at the north end, where Route 198 meets Main Street. Walk south on the east side of the street with the sun at your back.
7:23 to 8:01 AM: the sun clears the horizon and reaches the east-facing buildings all at once, wherever nothing stands in its way. Kingston Parish House, with nothing in its way, is the one to reach by 7:31 AM.
8:20 to 8:31 AM: at the south end, three buildings that turn a little more to the south catch the sun straight on. The Mathews Maritime Museum catches it at 8:25 AM.
9 AM to 1 PM: the farmers market on the Court Green.
5:38 to 6:14 PM: walk back north on the west side. The sun sets off to the south, so its last light slants across the west-facing buildings and picks out every doorway and window frame.

What stands in the way

A low sun reaches a wall only when nothing taller stands between them. For each stop, Henge Days looked from just in front of the wall toward the sun, out to 600 meters, and found the highest roofline. Where the sun is above it, the view is clear.

20 of the 51 stops have a clear view. Most of the blocked ones are downtown, where buildings stand close on both sides of the street. Ten of the clear east-facing walls have no name on the map; six of them are between 430 and 515 meters from Route 198.

Few buildings in Mathews have a height in OpenStreetMap. Where one is missing, the check assumes a height from the kind of building: 6 meters for a house or shop, 10 meters for a church, school or public building. The tables mark those results as estimated. Trees are not part of the check, and in October they still have their leaves.

Morning, east-facing fronts

Stop	Time	Building	Wall	Light	Clear view
3	7:30 AM	HyCo Market West side, 25 m from Route 198	E 95°	Sunrise, 10° off the wall	Blocked by Hardee's, 7.3° (height estimated)
7	7:30 AM	Moughon's Ace Hardware West side, 64 m from Route 198	E 98°	Sunrise, 7° off the wall	Blocked by Morgan & Edwards, 12.6° (height estimated)
16	7:30 AM	Foster-Faulkner Funeral Home West side, 257 m from Route 198	E 96°	Sunrise, 10° off the wall	Blocked by Food Lion, 2.4° (height estimated)
21	7:30 AM	Isabell Horsley Real Estate West side, 336 m from Route 198	E 91°	Sunrise, 15° off the wall	Blocked by a building, 12.7° (height estimated)
28	7:31 AM	Richardson’s Cafe West side, 357 m from Route 198	ESE 103°	Sunrise, 3° off the wall	Blocked by a building, 12.5° (height estimated)
30	7:31 AM	The Halcyon Building West side, 388 m from Route 198	ESE 103°	Sunrise, 3° off the wall	Blocked by Mathews Memorial Library, 8.3° (height estimated)
33	7:31 AM	ERA Bay & River West side, 408 m from Route 198	ESE 103°	Sunrise, 3° off the wall	Blocked by Westville Christian Church, 4.6° (height estimated)
38	7:30 AM	Mi Casa Azteca West side, 459 m from Route 198	E 100°	Sunrise, 6° off the wall	Blocked by Roane's Antiques, 9.5° (height estimated)
48	7:31 AM	Kingston Parish House West side, 558 m from Route 198	ESE 103°	Sunrise, 3° off the wall	Clear
51	8:25 AM	Mathews Maritime Museum West side, 776 m from Route 198	ESE 114°	Head-on, sun 11° up	Clear

Evening, west-facing fronts

Stop	Time	Building	Wall	Light	Clear view
4	6:08 PM	Hardee's East side, 30 m from Route 198	W 276°	Sunset, 22° off the wall	Blocked by Moughon's Ace Hardware, 5.5° (height estimated)
8	6:08 PM	Morgan & Edwards East side, 69 m from Route 198	W 276°	Sunset, 22° off the wall	Clear
15	6:08 PM	Mathews Post Office East side, 255 m from Route 198	W 276°	Sunset, 21° off the wall	Clear
29	6:08 PM	Mathews Visitor Center East side, 380 m from Route 198	W 280°	Sunset, 26° off the wall	Blocked by a building, 8.0° (height estimated)
32	6:08 PM	Mathews Memorial Library East side, 405 m from Route 198	W 280°	Sunset, 26° off the wall	Blocked by a building, 12.2° (height estimated)
37	6:08 PM	Bay School Community Arts Center East side, 450 m from Route 198	W 281°	Sunset, 26° off the wall	Blocked by Mi Casa Azteca, 11.3° (height estimated)
40	6:08 PM	Roane's Antiques East side, 469 m from Route 198	WNW 282°	Sunset, 28° off the wall	Blocked by a building, 10.3° (height estimated)
46	6:08 PM	Oriental Lodge No. 20 East side, 512 m from Route 198	WNW 283°	Sunset, 29° off the wall	Clear

Weather

Late October at Norfolk, the nearest long weather record, averages a high near 68°F and a low near 54°F. Expect the low 50s at sunrise.
October is the clearest month of the year there. The sky is clear, mostly clear or partly cloudy about 63% of the time and overcast or mostly cloudy the rest.
On a calm, clear morning, fog can form over Put in Creek and the other creeks around the village and lift after sunrise. A thin fog softens the light on the fronts; a thick one hides the sun until it burns off.
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

Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.

Six buildings on the walk

Each entry shows the building the way its Henge Days page does: the map with the sunlit wall highlighted, the wall's next run of henge days with a Save button, and a strip with a year of sunlit days for every side of the building.

On October 24 several of these buildings catch the sun at an angle. Their rows point to the days when it meets them straight on: October 17 to 20 for the Halcyon Building and Kingston Parish House, November for the Maritime Museum, and April for the three buildings that face the sunset.

1 The Halcyon Building

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: east-southeast, facing 103°
Sun: At 7:31 AM the rising sun is almost square to the front, but the Mathews Memorial Library across the street hides it until about 8:10 AM. After that the light falls on the front nearly straight on.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand on the east side of Main Street, by the library, and frame the front with the corner of Church Street. The mural is on the side wall.
Clear view: Blocked by Mathews Memorial Library, which rises 8.3° toward the sun (height estimated); the sun is 1.3° up.

J. Eddie Callis built the Halcyon in 1930 as the Foster Bros. department store, at the corner of Main and Church Streets by the Court Green. Its third floor has been a roller rink, a furniture store, a film theater and a dance studio. A mural covers one side wall, and a mosaic made by Mathews High School students carries a line by Walt Whitman.

Map of The Halcyon Building in Henge Days, with the east-southeast wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 103°, toward the sunrise on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Sat, Oct 17 to Tue, Oct 20, 20264 mornings · best Tue, Oct 20

7:19 AM Henge sunrise, sun on the horizon ESE 103° 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 The Halcyon Building — 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 Kingston Parish House

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: east-southeast, facing 103°
Sun: At 7:31 AM the sun is just over the horizon and almost square to the front, with nothing in its way. The light stays low and warm on the wall until about 8:00 AM.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand on the east side of Main Street with the sun at your back.
Clear view: Clear. No building in the map data rises above the sun (1.3° up) in its direction.

Kingston Parish, the Episcopal parish of Mathews, bought this property on Main Street in 1894. St. John's Church stood here from 1898 until 1954. The parish house dates from the 1980s, and the rectory on the same lot is older than 1900 and part of the Mathews Downtown Historic District.

Map of Kingston Parish House in Henge Days, with the east-southeast wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 103°, toward the sunrise on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Sat, Oct 17 to Tue, Oct 20, 20264 mornings · best Tue, Oct 20

7:18 AM Henge sunrise, sun on the horizon ESE 103° 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 Kingston Parish House — 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

3 Mathews Maritime Museum

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: east-southeast, facing 114°
Sun: The sun meets the front straight on at 8:25 AM, still low in the sky, with nothing in its way. It is the last stop of the morning, south of the center.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand across Main Street with the sun at your back. At 8:25 AM the shadows of the trim fall straight back into the wall.
Clear view: Clear. No building in the map data rises above the sun (11.1° up) in its direction.

The Mathews Maritime Museum fills the former School Board and Extension office building at 482 Main Street. It is a museum of the county's maritime history and opens Fridays and Saturdays, 10 AM to 2 PM, from May through November.

Map of Mathews Maritime Museum in Henge Days, with the east-southeast wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 114°, toward the sunrise on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Wed, Nov 4 to Thu, Nov 19, 202616 mornings · best Thu, Nov 19

6:50 AM Golden sunrise, sun 0° up ESE 114° 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 Mathews Maritime Museum — 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

4 Mathews Memorial Library

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: west, facing 280°
Sun: In late October the sun sets well to the south of the front, and the buildings across Main Street block it from about 5:05 PM. In April the sunset lines up with this wall.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand on the west side of Main Street in the late afternoon, when the light crosses the front from the southwest.
Clear view: Blocked by a building, which rises 12.2° toward the sun (height estimated); the sun is 1.0° up.

The library began in 1926 as a memorial to the county's World War I dead and was dedicated in 1937. In the early 1980s it moved into the former Farmers and Fishermens Bank on Main Street, and an expansion was dedicated in 2003.

Map of Mathews Memorial Library 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 280°, toward the sunset on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Sat, Apr 10 to Mon, Apr 12, 20273 evenings · best Sat, Apr 10

7:33 PM Henge sunset, sun on the horizon W 280° 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 Mathews Memorial Library — 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

5 Bay School Community Arts Center

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: west, facing 281°
Sun: In late October the sun sets well to the south of the front, and the buildings across Main Street block it from about 5:10 PM. In April the sunset lines up with this wall.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand on the west side of Main Street, before about 5:10 PM, when the light still clears the buildings across the street.
Clear view: Blocked by Mi Casa Azteca, which rises 11.3° toward the sun (height estimated); the sun is 1.0° up.

The Bay School, founded in 1997, has been at 279 Main Street since 2001. It is a community arts center with a gallery, and its front was renovated in 2015.

Map of Bay School Community Arts Center 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 281°, toward the sunset on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Sat, Apr 10 to Tue, Apr 13, 20274 evenings · best Sat, Apr 10

7:34 PM Henge sunset, sun on the horizon W 281° 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 Bay School Community Arts Center — 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

6 Oriental Lodge No. 20

Mathews, Virginia

Wall: west-northwest, facing 283°
Sun: At 6:08 PM the setting sun reaches the front from the side, with nothing in its way, and draws long shadows across it. In April the sunset lines up with this wall.
Leaves: Expect mostly green trees on October 24, with early color in the maples and sweetgums. Color in the Tidewater usually peaks in early to mid November.
Where to stand: Stand on the west side of Main Street. The sun sets to your left, so its light slants across the front.
Clear view: Clear. No building in the map data rises above the sun (1.0° up) in its direction.

OpenStreetMap lists this building as the hall of Oriental Lodge No. 20, a Masonic lodge. An 1887 booklet of its by-laws places the lodge at Mathews Court House. Henge Days found no date for the building.

Map of Oriental Lodge No. 20 in Henge Days, with the west-northwest wall highlighted and every wall labeled with its bearing — The building page in Henge Days. The highlighted walls face 283°, toward the sunset on the days in the row below; every wall carries its bearing.

Thu, Apr 15 to Sat, Apr 17, 20273 evenings · best Thu, Apr 15

7:38 PM Henge sunset, sun on the horizon WNW 283° 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 Oriental Lodge No. 20 — 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

Near Main Street

Mathews County Courthouse Square, at Church and Court Streets, holds the courthouse of about 1830, the clerk's office, a small jail and the Court Green. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Tompkins Cottage, about 1820, is on Brickbat Road, off Main Street. The Mathews County Historical Society opens it on Saturdays from 10 AM to 1 PM in season; check that it is open on October 24.
The Mathews Visitor Center on Main Street opens Thursday to Saturday, 10 AM to 4 PM.

Plan a walk on your street

Open Along a street and enter the two ends of a street, its name and a date. The map and the list show every wall the sun lines up with that day, in walking order.
Change the date to compare seasons. On Main Street in Mathews, the west-facing fronts take the setting sun head-on in mid April.
Search for one building on the home page to see every wall's days for the year.
Save the days you want in your planner. It keeps them in one list, can send them to your calendar app and shows the cloud forecast from 10 days ahead.

Plan a walk in Along a street 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

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Planning a photo walk with Henge Days: sunrise and sunset on Main Street, Mathews, Virginia, Saturday, October 24, 2026

How the walk was planned

The plan for October 24

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Morning, east-facing fronts

Evening, west-facing fronts

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Six buildings on the walk

1 The Halcyon Building

2 Kingston Parish House

3 Mathews Maritime Museum

4 Mathews Memorial Library

5 Bay School Community Arts Center

6 Oriental Lodge No. 20

Near Main Street

Plan a walk on your street

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