Follow the Sun – Live Map of Day and Night on Earth
See in real time where it is day and night on Earth. The terminator line shows where the sun is rising and setting right now.
Explore day & night in real-time on the interactive 3D globe
Watch in real-time where day and night are on Earth. The orange line shows the terminator – the boundary between day and night, where sunrise or sunset is happening right now.
How the sun globe works
The globe shows Earth exactly as the sun lights it right now. Rotate it, pick a city to see its local sun times, or move the time slider and watch daylight sweep around the planet.
Subsolar point: The bright marker sits where the sun stands directly overhead — the one place on Earth where a vertical pole casts no shadow at that moment. It circles the globe once every 24 hours and drifts between the tropics over the year.
Day-night line: The sharp edge between the lit and the dark half is the terminator. Everywhere along it the sun is just rising or setting, and it races west at roughly 1,600 km/h at the equator.
Golden hour band: The warm band hugging the terminator marks where the sun sits just above the horizon: the soft, low light photographers plan their shoots around.
Controls
Drag to rotate the globe and find your part of the world.
Tap a city marker for its local time, sunrise, sunset and daylight length.
Press play to speed time up, or reset to jump back to right now.
Questions about the sun globe
Why is half of Earth always dark? Earth is a sphere lit by one distant star, so only the half facing the sun is in daylight. The globe shows that half live; the boundary between the two moves constantly as the planet turns.
What exactly is the subsolar point? It is the spot where the sun stands 90° overhead. It never leaves the belt between 23.4° north and 23.4° south, touching the Tropic of Cancer at the June solstice and the Tropic of Capricorn in December.
Why is the day-night line tilted? Earth's axis is tilted by 23.4°. That tilt leans the terminator, which is what gives the polar regions midnight sun in summer and polar night in winter. Only at the equinoxes does the line run straight from pole to pole.
Are the times on the globe accurate? Sun positions come from standard astronomical formulas and are accurate to about a minute for a given city. Atmospheric refraction near the horizon and the local terrain can shift the sunrise you actually see by a minute or two.
Sun positions are calculated in the browser from each city's coordinates; no weather data is involved. Times refer to a flat horizon at sea level.