Sunrise & Sunset Times

Sunrise & Sunset Times MCP server

A free, remote MCP server that gives AI assistants and agents accurate sun and moon times for any place on Earth and any date: sunrise, sunset, twilight, golden hour, blue hour, solar position, moonrise, moonset and moon phase. By Sunrise-Sunset.org.

https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp

• No API key, no sign up. Add the URL to your client and ask.
• Remote. Nothing to install or run: Streamable HTTP, no authentication.
• Local time. Times come back in ISO 8601 in the time zone of the place.
• Polar day and night handled. Each day says whether it is normal, midnight sun or polar night, and events that do not happen are null, never a made-up time.

Contents

• Connect it
• Tools
• Things to ask
• Example result
• Try it with curl
• Limits and attribution
• Questions and problems
• License

Connect it

Claude (claude.ai, desktop and mobile apps): Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, and paste the URL above.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http sunrise-sunset https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp

ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced settings → Developer mode, then add the URL as a custom connector.

Codex:

codex mcp add sunrise-sunset --url https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp

Cursor: add this to ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or to .cursor/mcp.json inside a project (same as mcp.json):

{ "mcpServers": { "sunrise-sunset": { "url": "https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp" } } }

VS Code (GitHub Copilot agent mode): add this to .vscode/mcp.json (same as configs/vscode-mcp.json):

{ "servers": { "sunrise-sunset": { "type": "http", "url": "https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp" } } }

Any other MCP client works too: it is a standard remote server over Streamable HTTP with no authentication. More details in the setup guide.

Tools

Both tools are read-only and return the same per-day object.

get_sun_times

One place, one day.

Parameter	Required	Description
lat	yes	Latitude in decimal degrees, -90 to 90.
lng	yes	Longitude in decimal degrees, -180 to 180.
date	no	today (default), tomorrow or YYYY-MM-DD. Relative dates use the local date of the place.
tz	no	IANA time zone such as Europe/Madrid. Leave it out and the time zone of the coordinates is used (recommended).

get_sun_times_range

One place, up to 366 consecutive days in a single call: calendars, trips, or comparing seasons without one call per day.

Parameter	Required	Description
lat, lng, tz		As above.
date_start	yes	First day, YYYY-MM-DD.
date_end	yes	Last day, inclusive, YYYY-MM-DD.

A range can return fewer days than requested: calendar days that never existed in that time zone are left out (Samoa skipped 30 December 2011 when it moved across the date line). Match each entry by its date field.

What each day contains

sunrise, sunset, solar_noon, day_length (seconds), sun_status (normal, midnight_sun or polar_night), civil, nautical and astronomical twilight, dawn, dusk, first_light, last_light, golden_hour and blue_hour (morning and evening), the sun's azimuth at sunrise and sunset and its altitude at noon, moonrise, moonset, moon_phase and moon_illumination. Both tools declare an outputSchema, so clients and agents know every field and type in advance.

Things to ask

• "When is golden hour in San Francisco tomorrow?"
• "How much daylight does Seattle lose during November?"
• "Give me sunrise and sunset in Tromsø for every day of December 2026."
• "Which nights this month will be darkest for stargazing in Moab, Utah?"

Example result

get_sun_times for Lisbon on 24 December 2026 (shortened):

{
  "date": "2026-12-24",
  "tzid": "Europe/Lisbon",
  "utc_offset": "+00:00",
  "lat": 38.72,
  "lng": -9.14,
  "sunrise": "2026-12-24T07:52:21+00:00",
  "sunset": "2026-12-24T17:19:57+00:00",
  "solar_noon": "2026-12-24T12:36:08+00:00",
  "day_length": 34056,
  "sun_status": "normal",
  "dawn": "2026-12-24T07:22:27+00:00",
  "dusk": "2026-12-24T17:49:51+00:00",
  "golden_hour": {
    "morning": { "begin": "2026-12-24T07:33:53+00:00", "end": "2026-12-24T08:34:15+00:00" },
    "evening": { "begin": "2026-12-24T16:38:04+00:00", "end": "2026-12-24T17:38:25+00:00" }
  },
  "moonrise": "2026-12-24T17:48:33+00:00",
  "moonset": "2026-12-24T08:29:49+00:00",
  "moon_phase": "Full Moon",
  "moon_illumination": 99.61
}

Try it with curl

The server speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 over POST:

curl -s https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"get_sun_times","arguments":{"lat":38.72,"lng":-9.14,"date":"2026-12-24"}}}'

Prefer plain HTTP? The same data is available as a REST API: see sunrise-sunset-org/api.

Limits and attribution

• Free for reasonable use. For many days at one place, use get_sun_times_range instead of one call per day. A client that calls the server in a tight loop may get HTTP 429 for a short while.
• Attribution is required wherever people see the data: a link to sunrise-sunset.org, or a mention of Sunrise-Sunset.org when there is no screen. Details in the API repository.
• Is the server down? Check the status page.

Questions and problems

Open an issue. Include the client you use, what you asked and what came back.

Changes to the server are announced as releases of the API repository: click Watch → Custom → Releases there to get them.

License

The files in this repository (configuration and examples) are under the MIT License. The data the server returns has its own terms: free to use with the attribution described above. See the API documentation.