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▶Wedding Day Timeline
Golden hour is 32 minutes, not sixty. This one computes it.
Every wedding timeline is a list of times somebody typed. This one computes: the light from your own venue coordinates, the schedule as a chain where one slip moves everything below it, and what those extra minutes will cost you before you are standing in them.
- Sunset, golden hour and civil twilight, solved in the sheet from your own coordinates
- A run of show where an unpinned block starts when the one above it releases
- Getting Ready divides the chair time across your artists and backsolves the start
- A vendor call sheet holding contracted hours against the real clock
- Overtime billed the way contracts actually bill it: a part increment as a whole one
Overview
Golden hour is 32 minutes, not sixty. This one computes it.
Every wedding timeline is a list of times somebody typed. This one computes: the light from your own venue coordinates, the schedule as a chain where one slip moves everything below it, and what those extra minutes will cost you before you are standing in them.
Type the date, the venue’s latitude and longitude and the UTC offset in effect that day, and the Sun and Light tab returns sunrise, solar noon, sunset, golden hour and civil twilight using the solar equations published by NOAA — no add-on, no lookup, no internet. It was validated against the US Naval Observatory across twelve locations from 21 to 65 degrees north and all four seasons, and no time was out by more than one minute.
What's Included
One workbook, 12 tabs, in four color editions:
- Wedding-Day-Timeline.xlsx: the 12-tab workbook with 1,262 formulas, opening in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers
- The same workbook in a Light, a Dark and an Editorial edition, so it reads on any screen and prints cleanly
- A worked sample of a Saturday wedding for 132 guests and 13 vendors you can read, then delete
- A full narrated video walkthrough of every tab
Key Benefits
Why this one
The accepted top of golden hour is the sun six degrees above the horizon, and across the continental United States that lands 32 to 48 minutes before sunset. In the sample — Austin, Texas, in October — sunset is 6:59 PM and golden hour opens at 6:27 PM. The photographer had blocked 5:59 to 6:59, so the first 28 minutes of that hour are dull light and 15 minutes of the good light fall after sunset, when most couples have already gone inside.
Type the date, the latitude, the longitude and the UTC offset in effect that day, and the Sun and Light tab solves sunrise, solar noon, sunset, golden hour and civil twilight in the cells using the solar equations published by NOAA. No add-on, no internet, nothing to install. It was checked against the US Naval Observatory across twelve locations from 21 to 65 degrees north and all four seasons, and no time was out by more than a minute.
The Run of Show is a chain, not a list: an unpinned block starts when the one above it releases. Pin the ceremony to the clock and the portraits to golden hour, and watch the other sixteen blocks fall where they fall. In the sample the day ends 10:14 PM against a 10:00 PM sound cut-off, and every one of those fourteen minutes arrived from somewhere above.
The band works to a scale of fifty dollars per half hour or fraction thereof and there are seven of them, so fourteen minutes is one half hour and $350. The hall bills $200 an hour for any part of an hour. The photographers’ contracted eight hours ended at ten, so that is another $200. $750 for fourteen minutes — and because every one of those is rounded up, one minute over costs exactly the same as twenty-nine. The ladder does not move again until thirty-one minutes, when it steps to $1,100.
Eight people in the chair is 645 artist minutes. Two artists working in parallel is 435 minutes elapsed, and everyone has to be finished by two o’clock, so hair starts at 6:45 in the morning. Nobody types that number. Add a third artist and the same eight people take 360 minutes and the alarm goes off at eight.
Family formals run about three minutes a grouping, so the fourteen groupings on this list are 42 minutes — counted from the list rather than assumed. The whole shot list comes to 432 minutes against 480 contracted, which leaves 48 minutes of margin you can see before the day rather than after it.
Who It's For
Built for
- Couples building their own wedding day, block by block
- Anyone whose photographer has proposed a portrait window and would like to know whether the light is actually there
- Anyone signing vendor contracts with an hourly rate and a billing increment
- Planners and photographers who get handed a timeline and have to make the arithmetic work
How It Works
Up and running in minutes
Your wedding date, the ceremony time, the venue’s latitude and longitude, and the UTC offset in effect on that date. That last one is a number of hours, not a time zone name.
Sun and Light returns sunrise, sunset, golden hour and twilight, plus what a date change does to all of it. Pin the portraits to that window, not to a round number.
Pin the ceremony to the clock and the portraits to golden hour; leave everything else to cascade from the block above it.
Arrival, contracted hours, the billing increment and the rate, per vendor. They genuinely differ, and the cost of an overrun follows from them.
The cascade slip, the hard-stop margin, the light-versus-schedule collision and the overtime exposure, all counted from the tabs above.
Why It's Different
Not another template
Twelve of thirteen timing words — sunset, golden hour, civil twilight, overtime, hard stop, load out, buffer, formula among them — appear in none of the eight page-one competitors. That shelf is Canva templates. This is the arithmetic none of them can do, and the golden-hour correction alone is worth the file: the accepted top of golden hour is the sun six degrees up, which across the continental US is 32 to 48 minutes before sunset, not sixty.
Delivery & Compatibility
Instant, and it opens in what you already use
As soon as your order is complete you get instant access to download the ZIP, so you can type your venue’s coordinates in tonight and see when the light actually arrives.
Five .xlsx workbooks (Wedding-Day-Timeline.xlsx plus the Colorful, Light, Dark and Editorial editions) delivered as one ZIP, instant download. Portable formulas only — no macros, no add-ons, no account and nothing to cancel. The solar engine is written to work in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers alike, and does not depend on any spreadsheet’s date epoch.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Will it work in Google Sheets?
Yes. The solar engine is written so it works in Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers, and it does not depend on any spreadsheet’s date epoch.
How accurate are the sunset times?
They use the solar equations published by NOAA and were checked against the US Naval Observatory across twelve locations and all four seasons, with no time out by more than one minute.
What is the one setting people get wrong?
The UTC offset. It is a number of hours in effect on the wedding date, not a time zone name. Get it wrong and every sunrise and sunset is out by exactly an hour.
Are the overtime rates real?
The rates, increments and cut-off times are all yours to type. The ones in the sample come from published union scale, filed venue contracts and a city sound ordinance; your own contracts are what govern.
For personal use. A planning tool that organizes the times, vendors and contract terms you enter; not legal or contractual advice. Solar times are computed from the coordinates and UTC offset you supply and are approximations for planning, not for navigation or legal purposes. Overtime rates, billing increments and curfews vary — confirm every one against your own signed contracts.
