Prayer times from Fajr to Isha, on the Sun

What Risetime does for prayer times

Risetime is a clock app for Android: alarms at a fixed time or following the sun, and timers that repeat and chain. No ads ever and completely offline.

Risetime does not set your prayer times: communities count them in different ways, and choosing between them is not its place. You pick the conventions your community follows, and Risetime rings at them. Unsure which to follow? Check with your mosque. Risetime is a clock, not an authority.

What are the prayer times based on?

Most of the five daily prayers are tied to the Sun: Fajr at dawn, Dhuhr after solar noon, Asr in the afternoon, Maghrib at sunset and Isha when night has fallen. They are counted from the sky, not from a fixed hour, so they move a little every day and a lot between seasons. That is why a printed timetable is only good for one place.

In Risetime, each of these moments is an anchor: a moment of the solar day that the app calculates again every day for your location. You then set your own alarms on the anchors you choose: at the anchor, or a number of minutes before or after it.

Why do prayer timetables give different times?

Because the sky does not say where dawn or night begin, and communities settled it in different ways. The differences are in a few places:

• Fajr: the Sun at an angle below the horizon, from 12° (UOIF) to 20° (MUIS, JAKIM, Kemenag). A larger angle means an earlier dawn.
• Isha: an angle too (12° to 18°), or a fixed time after sunset, 90 minutes (Umm al-Qura, Gulf Region, Qatar) and 120 minutes in Ramadan for Umm al-Qura.
• Asr: when the shadow of an object is as long as the object (Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanbali), or twice as long (Hanafi).
• Maghrib: at sunset, or a few minutes later, when the Sun is 4° or 4.5° below the horizon (Jafari, Tehran).
• The Moonsighting Committee Worldwide uses a seasonal method for dawn and dusk.

None of these is “the right one”. They are the methods of different communities and organisations. Your mosque’s timetable follows one of them; Risetime can follow any.

Which angle does each method use?

The link builder below offers these and more, each by name.

Far from the equator, in summer, the angle may never be reached

Above about 48.5° N, the Sun does not go 18° below the horizon in the weeks around midsummer: there is no night dark enough for Fajr or Isha at that angle, and the angle gives no time. Without a rule, the alarm would not ring on those days.

Communities use a limit for those weeks: the middle of the night, one seventh of the night, or a share of the night equal to the angle divided by 60. The link builder lets you choose, and does not recommend one: ask your community which it follows.

How do I set an alarm for a prayer time?

Noon and Sunset are ready to use, with an offset if you want one; Fajr and Isha at an angle are anchors of the solar angle kind; Asr is an anchor of the shadow kind. How anchors and offsets work — or let this page create them for you, further down.

Then paste them into Risetime

1. Copy your links, above.
2. In Risetime, open Settings › Anchors › Advanced › Import anchors.
3. Paste your links in the Paste anchor links field, and import. More on importing anchors.

Something missing, or a mistake?

These conventions come from public sources and I may have missed one, or got one wrong. If so, please write to me: I will fix it.

What an anchor can and cannot do

• An anchor gives the time computed for your location. That time changes every day with the Sun.
• One link describes one anchor. It is a rule, not a table of times: Risetime computes a new time each day.
• It follows no calendar: it rings on the days you set it to ring.
• Fixed offsets are in whole minutes.

What it costs

Risetime is free for up to three alarms and three timers – forever. Need more? Use those three first, and see if it’s worth your support: supporters get unlimited alarms and timers, yearly or once. If not, I’ll be happy to read your message. Five daily prayers take more than three alarms.