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.
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.
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, colour 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.
Usage over the last 30 days and the feedback inbox.
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.