Low Desert Almanac

Sun Path & Shade Finder

Where the sun is through the day at Phoenix latitude, on any date, with sunrise and sunset bearings and a note on which walls take the afternoon sun.

Yard & Garden

Where will the shade fall, and when?

Any date in any year. The equations do not need the year to be the current one.

Which way does the surface face?

A wall, a window, a fence or a car windscreen: anything upright with open ground in front of it.

What the chart is drawn for

Latitude
33.4278° N
Longitude
112.0039° W
Elevation
337.4 m
Time zone
MST, UTC−7, all year
Clock on this page
12-hour, no daylight saving

These are Phoenix Sky Harbor's coordinates, the station the rest of this site's climate data comes from, so the sun times here line up with the normals on other pages.

1 November 2026 · sunrise to sunset

10 h 51 m of daylight

Sunrise 6:46 AM at bearing 106° (ESE), sunset 5:37 PM at 253° (WSW). The sun is highest at 12:12 PM, 42.4° above the horizon. The sun stands 14.2° south of the equator today. A normal 1 November 2026 at Sky Harbor reaches 83 °F and falls to 60 °F.

The sun's track across the sky

The sun's bearing runs left to right, from east through south to west, and its height above the horizon runs bottom to top. The heavier stretch is the part after solar noon. A dot marks each whole hour.

Sun path at Phoenix on 1 November 2026The sun rises at 6:46 AM bearing 106 degrees, reaches 42.4 degrees above the horizon at solar noon, and sets at 5:37 PM bearing 253 degrees.30°60°ESESSWWsolar noon8a10a12p2p4p

The arc spans the day from sunrise to sunset. Its high point is the solar noon of 12:12 PM, at 42.4° above the horizon. The afternoon stretch, drawn heavier, is the 5 h 26 m from solar noon to sunset, the part of the day the west side of a building takes.

A west-facing surface

5 h 21 m of sun

In sun 12:12 PM to 5:32 PM. 5 h 21 m of that falls after solar noon.

The same day, hour by hour

Sun height and bearing for each hour of the day, with the shadow one foot of height throws at that moment.

Phoenix sun positions for
Time Sun height Bearing Direction Shadow, per foot Direct beam
6:46 AM sunrise0.0°106°ESEn/a0%
7:00 AM2.0°108°ESE28.54%
8:00 AM13.5°117°ESE4.223%
9:00 AM24.1°128°SE2.241%
10:00 AM33.0°141°SE1.554%
11:00 AM39.4°157°SSE1.264%
12:00 PM42.3°176°S1.167%
1:00 PM41.0°196°SSW1.266%
2:00 PM35.8°213°SSW1.458%
3:00 PM27.7°227°SW1.946%
4:00 PM17.7°239°WSW3.130%
5:00 PM6.5°248°WSW8.811%
5:37 PM sunset0.0°253°WSWn/a0%

Height and bearing are computed from the NOAA solar equations for Latitude 33.4278° N, Longitude 112.0039° W. Shadow is the length one foot of height throws, from one divided by the tangent of the sun's height, so it is shortest at solar noon and stretches past 11 feet per foot of height in the hour either side of sunrise and sunset. Direct beam is this site's own shading curve rather than a measurement, which is why it is given as a share rather than in watts. Sunrise and sunset are the moments the sun's upper limb touches the horizon, which is why the two end rows sit at 0.0° with a day length of 10 h 51 m rather than a round twelve hours.

Sun on each side of a building

How long a surface facing each way is in sun on this date, as a share of the day's daylight.

  • Northin shade all day
  • North-east2 h 44 m
  • East5 h 22 m
  • South-east8 h 00 m
  • South10 h 43 m
  • South-west7 h 59 m
  • West5 h 21 m
  • North-west2 h 43 m

Each bar is the share of this date's 10 h 51 m of daylight that a surface facing that way is in sun. A vertical surface sees the sun while the sun's bearing is within 90° of the bearing it faces, and nothing else is taken into account: no overhang, no tree, no wall across the street. The north bar is not always zero: in June the sun rises north of east and sets north of west, so a north-facing wall catches an hour or two at either end of the day.

After solar noon the sun runs from S round to WSW at sunset. The afternoon lands on the west- and south-west-facing surfaces, both hold it for about 5 h 21 m on this date, close enough to each other that the page names both rather than picking a winner.

How this works

Method

Where these numbers come from

Everything on this page is computed, not looked up. The sun's declination, the equation of time, the hour angle, its height above the horizon and the bearing it sits on are all worked out from the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory's solar calculation equations (the same equations the NOAA Solar Calculator runs) using Phoenix Sky Harbor's latitude of 33.4278° N and longitude of 112.0039° W. No sunrise table is stored anywhere on this site and no sun angle is copied from one, which is why the page can answer for a year long past or long ahead as easily as for today.

The accuracy that buys is about a minute on sunrise and sunset at this latitude. That is well inside anything a planting or shading decision needs, and it is why the page prints times to the minute rather than to the second.

What the chart is showing you

The horizontal axis is the compass bearing the sun is on, running from east through south to west, and the vertical axis is how far above the horizon it is. So the curve is the sun's actual track, drawn as you would see it standing facing south with the roof taken off. The horizontal band stops at 60° and 300° rather than going the whole way round, because that is the stretch of sky the sun occupies at this latitude (61° at sunrise on the longest day, 299° at sunset on the same day) and squeezing the whole circle in would make the useful part of the picture half the size it needs to be.

The arc's high point is the hour of solar noon and it falls away to the horizon at both ends, which is the shape of the day. The heavier stretch of the curve is the part after solar noon, so the afternoon is drawn rather than described. A dot marks each whole hour, labelled every second hour, and the dashed vertical line is the meridian the sun crosses at solar noon.

Solar noon is not twelve o'clock

It never is in Phoenix, and the gap is wide enough to matter for shading. Two things cause it. The first is longitude: the city sits at 112.0° W, about 7° west of the 105° W meridian its time zone is drawn around, and each degree of longitude is four minutes of time, which puts solar noon 28 minutes late before anything else is counted. The second is the equation of time, the difference between clock time and the time the sun actually keeps, which comes from the earth's elliptical orbit and its tilted axis and moves the moment by up to 16 minutes one way and 14 the other across the year.

Put together, solar noon at Phoenix runs from 12:12 PM on 1 November 2026 to 12:42 PM on 14 February 2026, a window half an hour wide. Arizona is also the one state in the Mountain zone that does not observe daylight saving, so the clock stays on MST, UTC−7, all year and nothing here shifts by an hour in July. Every time on this page is directly comparable to every other one.

The two arcs worth knowing

On 21 June 2026 the sun is up for 14 h 22 m. It rises at 5:18 AM on a bearing of 61°, climbs to 80.0° above the horizon at solar noon, and sets at 7:40 PM on a bearing of 299°. On 21 December 2026 it is up for 9 h 56 m, rises at 7:28 AM on a bearing of 118°, reaches only 33.2° at solar noon, and sets at 5:24 PM on a bearing of 242°. The noon sun stands about 2.4 times higher in June than in December, and the shadow it throws changes by the same factor the other way: one foot of height throws 0.2 feet of shadow at noon in June and 1.5 feet at noon in December.

Those two arcs are why a yard's shade plan cannot be a single plan. The arithmetic's own longest day is 22 June 2026, at 14 h 22 m, and its shortest is 22 December 2026, at 9 h 56 m, though the peak is flat enough that the three days around the June solstice are within 6 seconds of one another, so which of them comes out on top is not worth reading anything into. A wall that shades a patio through June may not shade it at all in December, and a deciduous tree that looks indispensable in August is doing nothing by the middle of winter.

Which walls take the afternoon sun

Through the afternoon the sun runs from due south at solar noon round to west-north-west at the June sunset, or west-south-west at the December one, and the surfaces that face into that arc are the ones that take it: the west and south-west faces, which lead on every date this page can compute. Select a direction on the left and the page counts the minutes the sun's bearing is within 90° of the direction the surface faces, which is what it means for a vertical surface to see the sun. On 21 June 2026 a west-facing wall is in sun from 12:30 PM to 7:35 PM, and a south-west-facing wall from 11:48 AM. A north-facing wall is the interesting case: in midsummer it catches low sun in two short stretches at either end of the day and nothing at all in between, which is a large part of why it is the side of a house that stays cool.

What the count cannot see is everything else in the way. An overhang, a pergola, a neighbouring wall or a tree will take hours off these figures, and the page has no way to know about any of them. The limits below say what that leaves out.

Sources

Where this came from

Every figure this tool uses was read from the source named above on 11 October 2026. Anything still waiting on a check is listed in the site's data notes rather than shown here as if it were settled.

Limits and assumptions

Read this

A geometric answer to a physical question

This page answers where the sun is. It does not answer how much heat reaches you, how bright a room is, or how long a patio stays usable. Those depend on what is in the way, on the surface the sun lands on, and on the air between. Treat every figure here as the geometry of the question rather than as the answer to it, and treat a wall that measures well here as something to go and stand next to before you build against it.

  • Nothing here is a forecast and nothing here is a measurement. Every figure is arithmetic on published solar equations, run for one pair of coordinates. It describes where the sun is on a date; it has nothing to say about how much cloud is in the way.
  • The sun's position is worked out for Phoenix Sky Harbor, at Latitude 33.4278° N and Longitude 112.0039° W, the station every other dataset on this site comes from. Sunrise and sunset are within a minute of these across the whole Valley, but the time a particular yard actually sees the sun depends on what is around it.
  • Every surface on this page is treated as flat, vertical and unobstructed, with open ground in front of it. An overhang, a patio roof, a tree, a neighbouring wall, a hillside and the tilt of a wall that is not quite vertical are all outside the arithmetic.
  • The chart's horizontal axis runs from 60° to 300°, which is the band the sun travels at this latitude, so the far north of the sky is off the frame. A north-facing wall's summer sun is in the table and the bar list rather than visible on the arc.
  • A shadow here is the length one foot of height throws on level ground at that moment, with nothing between the object and the sun. Ground that slopes, or a shadow that has to climb onto a wall to be seen, changes the answer.
  • "Direct beam" in the table is this site's own shading curve taken from the sun's height. It is a shape rather than a reading, and nothing on this page presents it as irradiance or as a UV index.
  • The clock is fixed at MST, UTC−7, all year, because Arizona does not observe daylight saving. If you are reading this from somewhere that does, the times are Phoenix times and are not yours.
  • Sunrise and sunset are the moments the sun's upper limb touches the horizon, including atmospheric refraction and the sun's own width. That is the standard definition and it is why the two equinox dates do not give a day of exactly twelve hours.
  • The normal high and low printed in the readout are 1991–2020 climate normals from one airport station, rounded to whole degrees. They describe a typical day in that thirty-year window, not today, and the airport is warmer than ground a few miles out of the city.

Questions

Short answers
Why is solar noon never at twelve o'clock?
Two reasons, and they are worth separating. The first is longitude: Phoenix sits at 112.0° W, about 7° west of the 105° W meridian its time zone is drawn around, and each degree of longitude is four minutes of time, which puts solar noon 28 minutes late before anything else is counted. The second is the equation of time (the gap between clock time and the time the sun actually keeps, caused by the earth's elliptical orbit and its tilted axis), which moves the moment up to 16 minutes one way and 14 the other through the year. Together they put solar noon at Phoenix somewhere between 12:12 PM on 1 November 2026 and 12:42 PM on 14 February 2026. This page works that out for the date you pick rather than assuming twelve.
Does Arizona use daylight saving, and would that change these times?
Arizona has not observed daylight saving since 1968: clocks stay on Mountain Standard Time, UTC−7, all year. The rest of the Mountain time zone shifts to UTC−6 in summer, which is why an Arizona summer afternoon sits an hour behind a Denver one on the clock. This tool never applies a seasonal shift, because there is none to apply, and that is what makes every time on the page directly comparable to every other one.
Which walls take the afternoon sun in Phoenix?
The west-facing ones first and the south-west ones alongside them, on every date this page can compute. Through the afternoon the sun runs from due south at solar noon round to west-north-west at the June sunset, or west-south-west at the December one, so the two surfaces that face into that arc take the most of it. On 21 June 2026 a west wall is in sun from 12:30 PM to 7:35 PM (7 h 06 m) and a south-west wall from 11:48 AM, for 7 h 48 m. In December the same two surfaces still lead, at about 4 h 54 m each, but the arc is shorter and the sun never climbs high enough to clear much of anything. A north wall is the different case: in midsummer it catches the sun in two short stretches, early morning and late evening, when the sun is north of east and north of west, and gets nothing in between.
How long is the shadow of a tree or a wall?
It depends only on the sun's height, and the arithmetic is one divided by the tangent of that height. At solar noon on 21 June 2026, when the sun stands 80.0° above the horizon, one foot of height throws about 0.2 of a foot of shadow, so a 20-foot tree shades barely 4 feet. At solar noon on 21 December 2026, with the sun at 33.2°, the same foot throws about 1.5 feet and the same tree shades 31 feet. Mid-afternoon is the case worth planning with: on 21 June 2026 the figure is about 1.1 per foot at 4 PM, and about 4.1 at 4 PM in December. The table on this page gives it for every hour of whichever date you choose.
Does the sun ever pass directly overhead at Phoenix?
No. Phoenix is at latitude 33.4° N, and the sun's declination reaches only about 23.5° north of the equator in June, a figure this page computes rather than looks up. The two can never meet, so on the longest day the noon sun stops about 10° short of the zenith: 80.0° above the horizon, and always a little to the south. What that means in practice is that a shadow cast at solar noon falls to the north on every day of the year, and a north-facing wall or window never receives the midday sun. It is not the same as saying a north wall gets no sun at all: in June the sun rises north of east and sets north of west, so a north-facing surface catches low sun at both ends of the day.