Twice a year, Manhattan's streets line up with the setting sun and the city stops to look. Every wall on Earth has days like that. Henge Days finds yours, down to the minute.
Works anywhere OpenStreetMap has buildings. No account needed to look.
For photographers, filmmakers, muralists and architects
A façade without shadows. A scene lit from behind the camera at a known minute. A mural at its most saturated. A street that lines up with the sun once a year. Henge Days gives each of them a date and a time.
Name a building. Every sunrise and sunset that lands square on each wall over the year ahead, with the best day, the time, and a calendar event.
Try the Virginia Museum of Fine ArtsTwo ends of one street and a day. The walls the sun reaches between them, in the order you pass them, with the time at each.
Try US 17 through Tappahannock on December 12Save the days you want. Each gets a stand point, an arrive-by time, a cloud forecast, and a calendar feed your phone keeps up to date.
Open the plannerMore on each on the Features page.
Featured · live
New York
walls that get a true henge walls lit head-on only with a higher sun
See its henge days →Real footprints, real sun. Each card is computed as you read it.
Each link plans a real stretch of road for a day when its walls line up with the sun. The sun maths runs in your browser when the page opens.
Seven fronts on the south-west side get the setting sun square on, one after another, between 16:20 and 16:50.
The street runs north to south. Its west fronts catch sunrise and its east fronts catch sunset on the same day.
Sunrise lands square on the museum's east wall at 06:54 and on more than 40 row-house fronts along the Boulevard.
Every wall faces a compass direction. The sun's bearing sweeps across the sky each day. At the instant the two match, light strikes the wall head-on: shadows vanish into the surface, texture flattens, color saturates, and anything standing in front is lit from behind the camera.
For most walls that instant comes with the sun high. On a henge day it comes at sunrise or sunset, with the sun sitting on the horizon exactly where the wall points. That is Manhattanhenge, and it is not special to Manhattan: it is a property of any wall whose bearing the sun reaches at the horizon some day of the year.
Henge Days computes that for the building you name, from its real footprint, and ranks every day of the next year:
If you can only be there on certain dates, tell it when, and it picks the best of what you have, even a fringe day.
The dates come from map outlines and are never checked on the ground, so treat each one as a plan to confirm before you travel.
What Henge Days records while you use it, and why.
Usage records are kept for up to 12 months. Feedback is kept until it has been dealt with and for 12 months after that.
Use the Feedback button on any page.
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.
Every date and time on Henge Days is computed. Nobody has stood at a given building on a given date to check it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use the Feedback button on any page.
What changed since your last visit, the feedback inbox, failed searches, errors, accounts and usage over 30 days.
Your buildings, with the map, the walls and the days you plan to be there.
What changed in each release of Henge Days, newest first.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
A henge day is when the sun rises or sets exactly in line with a wall, lighting it head-on. This page lists those days for one building.This page lists the walls along one street that the sun reaches on the chosen day.
What is a henge day? Features