A practice that starts with the light, not with a number

Why first light is not a clock time

A practice that begins with the light does not begin at a number. First light moves through the year, and across a single time zone too: on 21 June the sun rises at 06:01 in Mumbai and 05:08 in Varanasi: fifty-three minutes apart, on the same clock.

Risetime sets an alarm on a moment of the sun instead of a clock time. That moment is an anchor, the distance you keep from it an offset.

Four ways to name first light

Definitions vary; these are the common ones. The app holds the one you set at every latitude and season — which a fixed “forty-five minutes before sunrise” cannot, the length of twilight changing with both.

Set the practice on sunrise

1. On the Alarms tab, press +.
2. In the top menu, choose Sunrise.
3. Leave the dial centred to ring at sunrise, or turn it to the gap you want, up to 11 h 59 min either way.
4. Press OK, then open the alarm in the list and set Repeat.

And the alarm early risers keep asking for is the other one: an alarm to go to bed, not one to wake up. Put it on the Sunset anchor with an offset, repeating — the same four steps. How to set a sunrise or sunset alarm

Before the sun: dawn by angle

1. Open Settings → Anchors and press + (it appears once the section is unfolded).
2. Keep the type on A solar angle. Enter −6° for civil dawn or −12° for nautical dawn, direction morning. It moves a tenth of a degree at a time, between −30° and +30°.
3. Name it, pick a colour — it will not save without one — and save.
4. On the Alarms tab, put an alarm on it.

Far north or south, the sun never gets that low for part of the year. The editor says so as you create the anchor — “The sun does not reach this angle here from X to Y”, with your own dates — and on those days the alarm stays silent rather than ring at a moment the sky never produced. Nothing is invented.

A fraction of the night

You can time the morning by the night rather than the dawn: a point a given way through the dark.

1. Settings → Anchors → +, and switch the shape to Division.
2. Scope Night, then the number of parts and the position — 2 to 48 parts, any boundary inside them.
3. Name it, pick a colour, save. A fresh draft's title reads Night · 1/15; it follows whatever you set.
4. Put an alarm on it.

The night here is exactly one thing: from a sunset to the following sunrise, split evenly. Inside the polar circles such a night may not exist; the anchor then has nothing to divide, and the app says so — without the dated range the angle form gives, which this shape has not. Matching a published timetable? Advanced → Shift by N minutes moves an anchor you made by up to thirty minutes either way.

What Risetime does not do

Its own labels stay astronomical — Sunrise, a solar angle, Night · 1/15 — while the name you type is yours. It is an alarm clock, nothing more:

• No chime partway through a session — no screen builds one timer out of several, so a thirty-minute sit cannot sound at ten and twenty.
• No meditation sounds, nothing guided. It rings; you stop it.
• Nothing lunar — Risetime does not compute the Moon: no phase, no lunar date.
• No sleep tracking, no account, no cloud, no internet permission at all — your location never leaves the phone. Privacy policy

How anchors and offsets work

What it costs

Risetime is free for up to three alarms and three timers — for good. 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 hear you out.