Daylight in Tartu
How much daylight there is today, when the sun rises and sets, and how the light swings between a six-hour December day and an eighteen-hour June one.
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How much daylight there is today, when the sun rises and sets, and how the light swings between a six-hour December day and an eighteen-hour June one.
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Tartu sits at 58° north. The length of the day here swings by twelve hours between midsummer and midwinter, and people who move here consistently say the darkness — not the cold — is the part nobody warned them about. This page works out today's light from the sun's own geometry, so it is never out of date.
Today
Tartu
16 h 32 m of daylight
About 4 minutes less daylight than yesterday
Hours of daylight on the 15th of each month.
On the shortest day, 21 December, the sun is above the horizon in Tartu for about 6 hours 20 minutes — roughly 09:00 to 15:20.
On the longest day, 21 June, it is up for about 18 hours 20 minutes — roughly 04:05 to 22:25.
That is the same city, the same window, twelve hours apart.
Around midsummer the sun sets, but it only sinks about 8 degrees below the horizon before it starts coming back up. It never reaches the depth that counts as full darkness, so the hours between roughly 23:45 and 02:45 are a deep blue twilight rather than night.
This is why jaanipäev, on 23–24 June, is spent outdoors and why the sky over the Emajõgi still has light in it at one in the morning.
At midday on the shortest day the sun stands about 8 degrees above the horizon in Tartu — about the height of a five-storey building seen from the other side of the street.
It is not only that the day is short. The light that does arrive comes in at a low angle all day, so shadows stay long from sunrise to sunset and rooms facing north never really brighten.
Estonia puts its clocks back on the last Sunday in October — 25 October in 2026. On the Saturday, the sun sets at about 17:46. On the Sunday, at about 16:44.
The day itself only got about five minutes shorter. The other hour is the clock moving, not the sun. It is worth knowing which is which, because the jump is what people actually notice, and it happens overnight.
Around the spring and autumn equinoxes, the length of the day in Tartu changes by about five minutes every single day — over half an hour a week.
Near the two solstices it almost stops: the days either side of midsummer and midwinter are within a minute or two of each other for weeks. That is why late June and late December both feel like they stand still, and why March and September feel like they are moving.
About these times
Source: Computed from Tartu's coordinates and standard solar astronomy — no external feed, checked 1 August 2026 (today).
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