Sunset moves ninety minutes across a wedding season

Every other constraint on a wedding day is somebody's decision. The venue's end time is a policy, the caterer's service time is a process, the ceremony length is a choice. Sunset is arithmetic, and it is the same arithmetic for you as for the wedding down the road.

It is also the constraint that most reliably surprises people, because it moves further and faster than intuition suggests. Between mid-June and mid-December it shifts by more than an hour and a half in the southern United States and by over two hours further north — and it does most of that moving in the eight weeks either side of the equinoxes, which is exactly when the peak wedding seasons are.

Austin, Texas

The 15th of each month, computed for the metro's own coordinates on Central time, with daylight saving applied where it applies.

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville sits at the eastern edge of Central time, which is why its evenings are noticeably shorter than Austin's in winter despite being on the same clock.

Charleston, South Carolina

Eastern time, and the shortest winter evenings of the three: sunset before half past five for four months of the year.

What to do with these numbers

Set the ceremony time from the sunset column, not from the venue's template

Venues quote a standard ceremony time because most of their weddings use it. It was set for the season the venue is busiest in, and it is wrong by an hour at the ends of the year.

If the latest-ceremony column is earlier than your ceremony, you need a first look

Or you need to accept that the couple's portraits are lit rather than natural. Both are fine. Discovering it on the day is not.

Put the fifteen minutes at sunset on the timeline as an item, with a time on it

Not as an intention. If the DJ does not know, an announcement happens while the couple are outside; if the caterer does not know, a course is served to an empty seat.

Check the date, not the month

Between the 1st and the 30th of October, sunset in Charleston moves by about half an hour. A timeline built for a friend's wedding four weeks earlier is half an hour wrong before anybody has done anything.

Where these numbers come from

They are computed astronomically from each city's coordinates, on the city's own clock, by the same code that runs inside Runsheet when a vendor builds a timeline — so the number here and the number in the product agree by construction rather than by somebody remembering to update a table.

Golden hour here means the window when the sun is between six degrees above the horizon and the horizon itself, which is the definition photographers mean. It runs between roughly thirty and forty-five minutes in these three cities depending on the season, and it is shorter than most people expect.

If your venue is outside these three metros, the golden hour calculator takes coordinates from a map and returns the same table for anywhere.

Questions we are asked about this

How much does sunset change between summer and winter?

In the southern United States, about an hour and a half between mid-June and mid-December. Further north it is more than two hours. Most of that movement happens in the weeks either side of the equinoxes, which coincides with the spring and autumn wedding peaks.

How long does golden hour last at a wedding venue?

Between about thirty and forty-five minutes in the continental United States, depending on the season and the latitude — shorter in summer at low latitudes, longer in winter and further north. Fifteen minutes of it is usually all a couple can be taken away for.