🌅 USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper

🚀 Pull sun and moon almanac data in seconds. Get rise, set, and transit times, twilight, moon phase, and illumination from the US Naval Observatory for any date and place on Earth.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-08 · 📊 Up to 24 fields per record · one record per location per date · global coverage

Turn the US Naval Observatory (USNO) almanac into clean, structured records you can drop into a photography planner, a sailing log, a field-research dataset, or an astronomy app. Give it one or more latitude,longitude points and a date or date range, and it returns the sun and moon events for each day at each place.

Coverage is global. The USNO rise/set/transit service computes events for any coordinate between latitude -90 and 90 and longitude -180 and 180, including polar day and polar night notes when the sun or moon never rises or sets. Times can be returned in UTC or shifted to any time-zone offset, with an optional daylight saving flag.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Photographers and videographers	Plan golden hour, blue hour, and moonlit shoots
Sailors, pilots, and surveyors	Look up twilight and solar noon for navigation
Field researchers and ecologists	Tie observations to sun and moon timing
Astronomy app and bot developers	Seed a rise/set engine without writing one

📋 What the USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper does

This Actor calls the public USNO rise/set/transit/twilight API and returns one clean record per location per date:

• Sun events — rise, set, upper transit (solar noon), and the begin/end of civil twilight.
• Moon events — rise, set, and upper transit.
• Moon phase — current phase name, fraction illuminated, and the nearest principal phase with its date and time.
• Context — the day of week, the time-zone offset used, and a daylight saving flag.

Polar conditions (continuous day or night) are passed through as a sunNote or moonNote instead of a time. Every record carries a scrapedAt timestamp.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description
locations	array	One or more latitude,longitude pairs. Latitude -90 to 90, longitude -180 to 180. Defaults to 38.9,-77.0 (Washington DC).
startDate	string	First date to fetch, in YYYY-MM-DD. Defaults to today.
endDate	string	Last date to fetch, in YYYY-MM-DD. Leave empty to fetch only the start date. A record is produced for every day in the range.
tz	integer	Hours offset from UTC for the returned times, -12 to 14. Use 0 for UTC, -5 for US Eastern Standard Time. Defaults to 0.
dst	boolean	When on, times are shifted one hour forward for daylight saving and flagged in the output. Defaults to false.
maxItems	integer	How many records to return. Free plan is capped at 10.

Example 1 — one week of almanac data for Washington DC

{
    "locations": ["38.9,-77.0"],
    "startDate": "2026-06-08",
    "endDate": "2026-06-14",
    "tz": -5,
    "maxItems": 7
}

Example 2 — a single date for several cities in UTC

{
    "locations": ["51.5,-0.13", "35.68,139.69", "-33.87,151.21"],
    "startDate": "2026-06-08",
    "tz": 0,
    "maxItems": 10
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the number of records is locations × dates. Three locations across a 10-day range is 30 records. At high latitudes near the solstices, the sun or moon may never rise or set; in that case the time fields are null and the reason appears in sunNote or moonNote.

📊 Output

Each almanac record looks like this:

Field	Description
📅 date	Observation date (YYYY-MM-DD)
🧭 latitude	Latitude used for the query
🧭 longitude	Longitude used for the query
🗓 dayOfWeek	Day of the week for the date
⏱ timeZoneOffset	UTC offset applied to the times
🌗 isDaylightSaving	Whether a DST shift was applied
🌙 currentMoonPhase	Current moon phase name
💡 fractionIlluminated	Fraction of the moon illuminated
🌑 nearestPhaseName	Nearest principal phase (New, First Quarter, etc.)
📆 nearestPhaseDate	Date of that nearest phase
🕐 nearestPhaseTime	Time of that nearest phase
🌅 sunRise	Sunrise time
🌇 sunSet	Sunset time
☀ sunTransit	Solar noon (upper transit)
🌄 beginCivilTwilight	Start of civil twilight
🌆 endCivilTwilight	End of civil twilight
📝 sunNote	Polar day/night note for the sun, if any
🌘 moonRise	Moonrise time
🌒 moonSet	Moonset time
🌕 moonTransit	Moon upper transit
📝 moonNote	Polar note for the moon, if any
🔢 apiVersion	USNO API version that served the data
🕒 scrapedAt	Collection timestamp
❌ error	Null on success

Real sample — almanac record

{
    "date": "2026-06-08",
    "latitude": 38.9,
    "longitude": -77.0,
    "dayOfWeek": "Monday",
    "timeZoneOffset": -5,
    "isDaylightSaving": false,
    "currentMoonPhase": "Waning Gibbous",
    "fractionIlluminated": "0.83",
    "nearestPhaseName": "Last Quarter",
    "nearestPhaseDate": "2026-06-09",
    "nearestPhaseTime": "14:43",
    "sunRise": "04:43",
    "sunSet": "19:32",
    "sunTransit": "12:07",
    "beginCivilTwilight": "04:11",
    "endCivilTwilight": "20:04",
    "sunNote": null,
    "moonRise": "23:51",
    "moonSet": "09:42",
    "moonTransit": "04:33",
    "moonNote": null,
    "apiVersion": "3.0.1",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-08T17:09:21.000Z",
    "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• One clean record per location per date, ready for a spreadsheet or database.
• Handles single dates or long date ranges in one run.
• Returns times in UTC or any time-zone offset, with an optional DST shift.
• Passes through polar day and polar night notes instead of dropping them.
• No account, no API key, and no login required.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Effort	Structured fields	Date ranges	Maintenance
This Actor	One run	Yes	Yes	None on your side
Copying from an almanac site	Hours	Inconsistent	Manual	Constant
Writing your own astronomy code	Days	Depends	You build it	You own the upkeep

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper.
3. Enter one or more locations as latitude,longitude.
4. Set a startDate (and optional endDate), tz, and maxItems.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

💼 Business use cases

Photography and film

Goal	How this helps
Plan golden and blue hour	Use sunrise, sunset, and civil twilight times
Schedule moonlit scenes	Use moonrise, moonset, phase, and illumination

Marine and aviation

Goal	How this helps
Prep navigation logs	Pull twilight and solar noon by coordinate
Brief crews on daylight	Snapshot sun and moon timing for a route

Field research

Goal	How this helps
Align observations to light	Tag samples with sun and moon timing
Build long time series	Sweep a date range for one site

Apps and automation

Goal	How this helps
Power a rise/set feature	Feed clean almanac records to your app
Run a daily snapshot	Schedule one location per day

🔌 Automating USNO Astronomical Almanac Scraper

Connect runs to the tools you already use:

• Make and Zapier to trigger runs and route records into sheets or databases.
• Slack to post the day's sun and moon times to a channel.
• Airbyte to load results into a warehouse.
• GitHub Actions to schedule periodic snapshots.
• Google Drive to archive each run's output.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: build multi-year almanac datasets for a study site.
• Personal: plan a stargazing night or a sunrise hike.
• Non-profit: power a community observatory's event calendar.
• Experimentation: prototype an astronomy app without writing the math.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant

Paste your results into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot and ask it to find the best shooting window, chart daylight length over a month, or compare twilight across cities.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a USNO account or API key? No. The Actor reads the public US Naval Observatory rise/set/transit API, which needs no login.

What locations are supported? Any coordinate on Earth, latitude -90 to 90 and longitude -180 to 180. Pass them as latitude,longitude strings.

Can I fetch a date range? Yes. Set startDate and endDate. One record is produced for every day in the range, for every location.

What time zone are the times in? Whatever you set with tz (hours from UTC). Use 0 for UTC. Turn on dst to shift one hour forward for daylight saving.

What happens at high latitudes? When the sun or moon never rises or sets, the time fields are null and the reason is reported in sunNote or moonNote.

What is "solar noon"? The sun's upper transit, returned in sunTransit. It is the moment the sun is highest in the sky.

Does it include moon phase? Yes. Every record carries the current phase, the fraction illuminated, and the nearest principal phase with its date and time.

How fresh is the data? Each run computes live from USNO, so it reflects the official almanac at run time.

How many records will I get? Locations × dates, capped by maxItems. Free runs are limited to 10.

Can I schedule this? Yes. Use Apify Schedules to snapshot any location on any cadence.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Results are available through the Apify API, so you can pull them into any app, database, or workflow you already run.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris Scraper
• NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP Ocean Data Scraper
• More science and reference data Actors in the ParseForge collection

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with the US Naval Observatory or the US Navy. Only publicly available data is collected.