Sunrise & Sunset Times MCP server

Sunrise-Sunset.org API

The free Sunrise-Sunset.org API on GitHub: sunrise, sunset, twilight, golden hour, solar position and moon data for any place on Earth. Here you find ready-to-run examples, the OpenAPI spec, the announcements of every change and a place to report problems.

Stay up to date: click Watch → Custom → Releases at the top of this page and GitHub will tell you whenever the API changes.

• Free. No sign up, no API key.
• Simple. You send a latitude and longitude, you get JSON back.
• Attribution required. Show a visible link to sunrise-sunset.org wherever you display the data.

Contents

• Quick start
• v1 or v2?
• Common pitfalls
• Examples
• For AI assistants (MCP)
• Usage limits and attribution
• Reporting problems
• License

Quick start (30 seconds)

Paste this into a terminal (or open the URL in your browser):

curl "https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/v2?lat=39.74&lng=-104.99&date=2026-08-15"

lat and lng are the latitude and longitude of the place, in decimal degrees (these are Denver, Colorado). You get back something like this (shortened):

{
  "date": "2026-08-15",
  "tzid": "America/Denver",
  "utc_offset": "-06:00",
  "sunrise": "2026-08-15T06:12:13-06:00",
  "sunset": "2026-08-15T19:55:56-06:00",
  "solar_noon": "2026-08-15T13:04:24-06:00",
  "day_length": 49423,
  "sun_status": "normal",
  "dawn": "2026-08-15T05:43:20-06:00",
  "dusk": "2026-08-15T20:24:43-06:00",
  "golden_hour": {
    "morning": { "begin": "2026-08-15T05:54:37-06:00", "end": "2026-08-15T06:49:15-06:00" },
    "evening": { "begin": "2026-08-15T19:19:00-06:00", "end": "2026-08-15T20:13:28-06:00" }
  },
  "moon_phase": "Waxing Crescent",
  "moon_illumination": 11.25
}

How to read it:

2026 at 06:12:13, local time, 6 hours behind UTC (the world reference time). Every programming language can read this format.

• Times use the ISO 8601 format. 2026-08-15T06:12:13-06:00 means 15 August

to work out its timezone yourself: tzid tells you which one it is.

• The times are already in the local time of the place. You do not need

• day_length is in seconds (48841 seconds is 13 h 34 min).
• Leave out date to get today (today in that place, not where your server is).

Other parameters: date=tomorrow, datestart + dateend for a range of up to 366 days, tz to get the times in a different timezone, and time_format=unix for Unix timestamps. Every field is explained in the documentation.

v1 or v2?

There are two versions. Use v2 for anything new.

v1 is supported indefinitely and keeps working exactly as it does today, so existing code will not break. It also keeps its original calculation, so its sunrises are a little early and its sunsets a little late (by up to several minutes, depending on place and date). v2 fixes that.

Migration table and v1 docs: v2 docs, "Migrating from v1" and v1 documentation.

Common pitfalls

These are the problems we see most often in real integrations.

1. "The times are off by a few hours" (v1)

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.