# Henge Days: when the sun hits a wall head-on > Enter an address and Henge Days lists the days and minutes the sun lines up head-on with each wall of the building, like Manhattanhenge. This is the Markdown form of https://hengedays.com/, with the same words as the page. ## The day the sun hits *that* wall head-on. 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 ### Light you can put in the calendar 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. #### Find a wall's days 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 Arts](https://hengedays.com/?example=vmfa-richmond) #### Drive a street for the light Two 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 12](https://hengedays.com/route?from=37.93777,-76.86752&to=37.92884,-76.86135&street=Church%20Lane&d=2026-12-12) #### Plan the shot Save 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 planner](https://hengedays.com/planner) More on each on the [Features](https://hengedays.com/features) page. ### Three streets, live Each link plans a real stretch of road for a day when its walls line up with the sun. The sun math runs in your browser when the page opens. #### Church Lane, Tappahannock, VA US 17 through town · December 12, 2026 Seven fronts on the south-west side get the setting sun square on, one after another, between 16:20 and 16:50. [Open this page](https://hengedays.com/route?from=37.93777,-76.86752&to=37.92884,-76.86135&street=Church%20Lane&d=2026-12-12) #### Main Street, Mathews, VA Court House to the south end · October 24, 2026 The street runs north to south. Its west fronts catch sunrise and its east fronts catch sunset on the same day. [Open this page](https://hengedays.com/route?from=37.43705,-76.32060&to=37.42816,-76.32362&street=Main%20Street&d=2026-10-24) #### North Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Richmond, VA Past the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts · November 17, 2026 Sunrise lands square on the museum's east wall at 06:54 and on more than 40 row-house fronts along the Boulevard. [Open this page](https://hengedays.com/route?from=37.55267,-77.47556&to=37.56358,-77.46970&street=North%20Arthur%20Ashe%20Boulevard&d=2026-11-17) ### What is a henge day? 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: - **Henge.** Sun on the horizon, under 1.5° up. A handful of days, twice a year, if the wall ever gets them. - **Golden.** Under 6°. Long, warm, raking light. The season around the henge. - **Low sun.** Under 15°. Still directional, with soft shadows. - **High sun.** Head-on, from overhead. Even light, hard shadows under ledges. 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. *Looking down on a building. The dashed arrow is the direction the wall faces; the orange arc is the sun's path for one day. Where they meet at the rim, the sun is on the horizon head-on.* ### How it works 1. **Type an address.** Henge Days looks it up with public geocoders and pulls the building's footprint from OpenStreetMap. 2. **Every wall gets a bearing.** Walls that face the same way are grouped, because they get the light at the same instant. 3. **The sun is computed, not looked up.** NOAA's solar position algorithm, accurate to a hundredth of a degree, run for every day in your range. 4. **You get dates.** Henge windows with their best day, the golden season around them, and a calendar event you can save. 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. --- Every date and time on Henge Days is computed from a building outline in OpenStreetMap and the position of the sun. Nobody has checked it on the ground. Hills, trees and other buildings can block a low sun. Treat each date as a plan to confirm before you travel. See https://hengedays.com/terms.md. Henge Days is free to use; sign in only to save days to a planner. Contact: hello@hengedays.com.