ENRO

Sunlight, moonlight and true night

Darkness & Moon

See golden hour, every twilight phase, astronomical darkness, and how the Moon affects the night.

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Weather

See hourly cloud cover, visibility, humidity, wind and precipitation chance.

Light pollution

Understand your Bortle class and look for darker nearby places.

Good to know

The three kinds of twilight

After sunset the sky darkens in three steps. Civil twilight ends when the Sun is 6° below the horizon and the brightest stars appear. Nautical twilight ends at 12°, when the horizon is no longer visible at sea. Astronomical twilight ends at 18°, and only then is the sky dark enough for faint galaxies and the Milky Way.

In midsummer at Romanian latitudes the Sun dips only a little past 18° below the horizon, so the fully dark window shrinks to a few hours around midnight; in winter it lasts most of the night. The Moon adds to this: check moonrise and moonset to find the truly dark hours.