PLANNING AROUND DAYLIGHT AT THE DESTINATION
I arrive in December and I want to know how much light I get
Not the temperature, not the forecast. Sunrise, sunset, and how much of the day is usable when you get there.
You have four days in Reykjavík in December. The weather forecast tells you it will be around freezing, which you expected and can dress for.
What it does not tell you is that the sun comes up around 11:00 and is gone by 15:30, and that your four days contain roughly seventeen hours of daylight in total.
Day length is about latitude, not temperature
This is the part people underestimate, because temperature and daylight are correlated at home and diverge sharply as you travel.
| Latitude | Midwinter day length | Midsummer |
|---|---|---|
| Equator (Singapore, Nairobi) | ~12 h | ~12 h |
| 30° (Cairo, New Orleans) | ~10 h | ~14 h |
| 40° (Madrid, New York) | ~9 h | ~15 h |
| 50° (Prague, Vancouver) | ~8 h | ~16 h |
| 60° (Oslo, Anchorage) | ~6 h | ~19 h |
| 64° (Reykjavík) | ~4 h | ~21 h |
| Above 66.5° | none | 24 h |
Near the equator, day length barely moves all year — which is why tropical countries never adopted daylight saving.
Above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise at all around midwinter, and does not set around midsummer.
What this does to a short trip
Four winter days at high latitude is not four days of sightseeing. It is roughly one long day's worth of usable light, spread thin.
Practical consequences:
- Anything outdoors has to happen between about 11:00 and 15:00. That is one activity a day, realistically.
- Museums, food and indoor things fill the rest, and they should be planned rather than defaulted to.
- Photographs are all golden hour, because the sun never gets high. This is genuinely a benefit — the light is beautiful and lasts for hours.
- Driving is mostly in the dark, which matters on unfamiliar roads in winter conditions.
The reverse case is real too
A summer trip to a high latitude has the opposite problem: it does not get dark. Stockholm in June has light until nearly midnight and again from three in the morning.
That is wonderful for a day and then it is a sleep problem, especially in accommodation without blackout curtains. Bring an eye mask; this is the single most useful thing to pack for a Nordic summer.
Clock time is a poor proxy for daylight
Two things break the intuition that "10pm means dark."
High latitude in summer, as above.
Wide time zones. In western China the clock runs several hours ahead of the sun, because the whole country uses one offset — so sunrise can be at mid-morning by the clock and that is the correct local time. See China's single zone.
What to actually look up
Before a trip where light matters, check sunrise and sunset at the destination for your specific dates — not the season generally, since day length changes fast near the solstices at high latitude.
That is a different question from the weather forecast, and it is the one that determines what your days will actually look like.
Related: Where is it daytime right now? · The day/night terminator, explained
Timezone: World Clock Widget
A world clock, converter and live day/night map for iPhone — 325 cities, offline, no account.
Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.