Sunrise 7:05 am and sunset 7:11 pm in Rovaniemi
Today, Thursday, September 24, 2026, the sun rises in Rovaniemi, Finland at 7:05 am and sets at 7:11 pm. That is 12 hours 6 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 1:09 pm. Rovaniemi is losing 7 minutes 10 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.
Sunrise time Rovaniemi
The sun rises in Rovaniemi, Finland at 7:05 am today. That is the moment the top edge of the solar disc first clears a flat horizon, which is the definition every almanac uses and the one the times here are computed to. The sky starts to lighten well before that: civil twilight, the point at which you can read outside without a light, begins at 6:13 am.
Sunrise here is moving later at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in Rovaniemi falls on July 6, 2026 at 1:25 am, and the latest on December 23, 2026 at 11:09 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in Rovaniemi is June 6, 2026, but the earliest sunrise and the latest sunset never sit exactly on it, because the equation of time slides underneath the whole pattern, and because the clocks move twice a year on top of that.
Sunset time Rovaniemi
The sun sets in Rovaniemi, Finland at 7:11 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 8:04 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 10:22 pm.
The latest sunset of 2026 in Rovaniemi is on July 6, 2026 at 1:06 am the next day, and the earliest is on December 20, 2026 at 1:22 pm. The gap between those two readings is the whole story of the year in one line, and it is wider here than at a city nearer the equator and narrower than at one nearer the pole.
Daylight and solar noon in Rovaniemi
Daylight today runs to 12 hours 6 minutes, from sunrise to sunset. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 1:09 pm, which is 69 minutes after clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Rovaniemi sitting at 25.73 degrees east while its clock is set to Europe/Helsinki, plus the equation of time, which today is 7.9 minutes ahead of mean time, plus an hour of daylight saving for part of the year.
The sun's declination today is -0.55 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. Rovaniemi is at 66.50 degrees north, just short of the Arctic Circle, which is why the day here is 12h 06m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in Rovaniemi swings by 21 hours 46 minutes, from 2h 14m on December 21, 2026 to 24h 00m on June 6, 2026.
Sunrise and sunset in Rovaniemi month by month
The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Rovaniemi, Finland rather than for the zone as a whole. Reading down the daylight column shows the shape of the year: short days around January, long days around July.
| Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight | Solar noon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 15 | 10:19 am | 2:35 pm | 4h 16m | 12:26 pm |
| February 15 | 8:26 am | 4:38 pm | 8h 12m | 12:31 pm |
| March 15 | 6:37 am | 6:16 pm | 11h 39m | 12:26 pm |
| April 15 | 5:35 am | 9:02 pm | 15h 27m | 1:17 pm |
| May 15 | 3:32 am | 10:58 pm | 19h 26m | 1:13 pm |
| June 15 | no sunrise, sun already up | no sunset | 24h 00m | 1:18 pm |
| July 15 | 2:37 am | 12:04 am the next day | 21h 27m | 1:23 pm |
| August 15 | 4:50 am | 9:50 pm | 17h 01m | 1:22 pm |
| September 15 | 6:36 am | 7:47 pm | 13h 11m | 1:12 pm |
| October 15 | 8:15 am | 5:50 pm | 9h 35m | 1:03 pm |
| November 15 | 9:10 am | 2:53 pm | 5h 43m | 12:02 pm |
| December 15 | 10:59 am | 1:25 pm | 2h 26m | 12:12 pm |
The extremes of the year in Rovaniemi
| Reading | Time or length | Date in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Longest day | 24 hours | June 6, 2026 |
| Shortest day | 2 hours 14 minutes | December 21, 2026 |
| Earliest sunrise | 1:25 am | July 6, 2026 |
| Latest sunrise | 11:09 am | December 23, 2026 |
| Earliest sunset | 1:22 pm | December 20, 2026 |
| Latest sunset | 1:06 am the next day | July 6, 2026 |
Rovaniemi has 30 days in 2026 when the sun never sets and 0 days when it never rises. Those counts are what the horizon crossing produces at 66.50 degrees north; they are not a rounding of "about two months".
Golden hour and blue hour in Rovaniemi today
Golden hour is the stretch when the sun sits between six degrees above the horizon and four below it, which is when the light is low, warm and soft. Blue hour follows it, from four degrees below down to six, when the sun is gone but the sky still carries a blue cast. Both happen twice a day, once either side of sunrise and sunset.
| Band | Time in Rovaniemi |
|---|---|
| Morning blue hour | 6:13 am to 6:33 am |
| Morning golden hour | 6:33 am to 8:15 am |
| Evening golden hour | 6:02 pm to 7:43 pm |
| Evening blue hour | 7:43 pm to 8:04 pm |
Neither is literally an hour. Each band is as long as the sun takes to cross those few degrees, so it is short near the equator where the sun drops steeply and long at high latitude where it slides in at a shallow angle. This evening it runs 1 hour 41 minutes in Rovaniemi.
Twilight times in Rovaniemi today
| Stage | Morning | Evening | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Astronomical twilight | 3:52 am | 10:22 pm | sun 18 degrees down, the sky is as dark as it gets |
| Nautical twilight | 5:08 am | 9:07 pm | sun 12 degrees down, the horizon is just visible at sea |
| Civil twilight | 6:13 am | 8:04 pm | sun 6 degrees down, bright enough to read outside |
Twilight is longer the further a place is from the equator, because the sun cuts down through the horizon at a shallower angle. In Rovaniemi the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 52 minutes.
Solstices and equinoxes in Rovaniemi
| Event | Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| March equinox | March 20 | 6:18 am | 6:33 pm | 12h 15m |
| June solstice | June 21 | no sunrise | no sunset | 24h 00m |
| September equinox | September 23 | 7:02 am | 7:15 pm | 12h 14m |
| December solstice | December 21 | 11:08 am | 1:22 pm | 2h 14m |
The equinoxes are the useful sanity check on any sun calculation: on those two days every place on Earth gets close to twelve hours between sunrise and sunset. It is not exactly twelve, and the reason is the same refraction and disc-edge convention that sets the times on this page. Sunrise is timed when the upper limb appears rather than the centre, and the atmosphere bends the image of the sun up over the horizon before it is geometrically there, so both ends of the day are pushed outwards by a few minutes. The seasons page has the exact instants.
How these times are worked out
The times on this page come from the NOAA solar position algorithm, the standard reduction of the calculations in Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. The chain is short and has no fitted constants in it: the sun's mean longitude and mean anomaly at the instant, the equation of centre to get from the mean to the true position, a correction for nutation to get the apparent longitude, the true obliquity of the ecliptic, and from those two the declination and the equation of time. Sunrise and sunset are then solar noon plus and minus the hour angle at which the sun reaches an altitude of -0.833 degrees.
That number, -0.833, is doing real work. Half of it, -0.2667 degrees, is the apparent radius of the sun, because sunrise is defined by the upper edge of the disc and not its centre. The other -0.5667 degrees is mean atmospheric refraction at the horizon, which lifts the image of the sun by roughly its own diameter. Ignore both and every sunrise on this site would be three or four minutes late and every sunset three or four minutes early.
The conversion into Europe/Helsinki is done through the IANA time zone database that ships inside Node, at the actual instant of the event, so daylight saving, half hour offsets and rule changes are all handled by the database rather than by an offset written down here. Rovaniemi does move its clocks: the zone runs at UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer, which is why the sunset column in the table above jumps by an hour between two adjacent months.
Questions
- What time is sunset in Rovaniemi?
- 7:11 pm today, September 24, 2026.
- What time is sunrise in Rovaniemi?
- 7:05 am today.
- When is golden hour in Rovaniemi today?
- The evening golden hour runs 6:02 pm to 7:43 pm, and the morning one 6:33 am to 8:15 am.
- What time does the sun set in Rovaniemi today?
- At 7:11 pm on September 24, 2026.
- What time does the sun rise in Rovaniemi today?
- At 7:05 am, giving 12 hours 6 minutes of daylight.
- How many hours of daylight does Rovaniemi get today?
- 12 hours 6 minutes, and the city is losing 7 minutes 10 seconds of daylight a day.
- Why is solar noon in Rovaniemi not at 12:00?
- Because Rovaniemi sits at 25.73 degrees east while its clock is set to a zone meridian somewhere else, and because the equation of time shifts apparent noon by up to about 16 minutes either way through the year. Today the two effects put solar noon at 1:09 pm.
- When is the longest day of the year in Rovaniemi?
- June 6, 2026, with 24 hours of daylight. The shortest is December 21, 2026 with 2 hours 14 minutes.
- Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?
- Yes. Every time on this page is the local clock reading in Europe/Helsinki at that instant, so it already includes daylight saving when daylight saving is in force.
Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities
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