About

What Time Meridian does

Time Meridian displays the current time — down to the second — for a place you choose, and lets you compare, convert and calculate across time zones. Alongside the clock you'll find a time-zone converter, a Unix timestamp tool, year calendars, sunrise and sunset times, and the exact difference between any two places.

It is a pure reference tool: there are no accounts, and everything works in the browser.

Precision — the exact time, not your device's time

Your computer or phone clock is often wrong by seconds or even minutes. When you open Time Meridian, the page measures the difference between your device clock and our server's clock: it makes several timing round-trips, keeps the fastest (most accurate) measurement, and uses half the round-trip as its error bar. The clock you see is then corrected by that offset, so it shows real time rather than whatever your device happens to think.

The display updates every second and stays live for as long as the page is open. If the correction can't be measured, the clock falls back to your device time rather than showing nothing.

Accuracy — time zones and daylight saving

Every offset, and every daylight-saving transition, is derived from the IANA Time Zone Database — the same authoritative dataset that operating systems and programming languages rely on. Because zones are resolved from IANA identifiers (such as "America/Los_Angeles" or "Europe/London"), clocks automatically move forward and back with local daylight-saving rules, including the many regional exceptions where some places observe DST and neighbours don't.

The date and direction of the next clocks change shown for each place comes from the same database, resolved to the exact minute of the transition.

When the underlying time-zone rules are updated, the site follows them — you never have to adjust anything by hand.

What you can find here

Time Meridian currently covers hundreds of the world's most-searched locations — around 200 cities, 70+ countries, key states and regions, and 30 named time zones — each with its live local time, UTC offset, daylight-saving status, and notable quirks.

For each place you can also see the time difference from your own location; sunrise and sunset with civil dawn, dusk and solar noon; the length of the day and how it changed since yesterday; the date of the next clocks change; the current moon phase; and the live Unix timestamp — and jump into the converter or calendar. This is a curated, hand-checked set rather than an exhaustive gazetteer, and coverage keeps expanding.

Where the data comes from

Time-zone offsets, daylight-saving rules and upcoming clock-change dates come from the IANA Time Zone Database (iana.org/time-zones), the global standard for time-zone information.

Geographic place names and coordinates follow open geographic references such as GeoNames (geonames.org).

Sunrise, sunset, civil dawn and dusk (sun 6° below the horizon), and solar noon are computed from each place's latitude and longitude using the standard NOAA solar-position equations — accurate to within a minute or two, which is the practical limit for these figures since atmospheric refraction varies with weather. The day-length change versus yesterday compares the same calculation across consecutive days, so those small errors cancel and the change is reliable to the second.

Moon phases are computed from the mean synodic month (29.53 days) against a reference new moon — accurate to well within a day, comfortably finer than the daily granularity of a phase display.

All of these figures are calculated live in your browser from the sources above; nothing is fetched from third-party APIs, so what you see cannot be stale.

Languages

Time Meridian is available in six languages — English, Français (French), Español (Spanish), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), ไทย (Thai) and Bahasa Indonesia — with localized place names, tool labels and descriptions. You can switch language from the row at the bottom of any page.