Where the first light lands this week, from Gornergrat to Haleakalā
The Gornergrat camera stands at 45.98314, 7.78331 and looks down the Gorner glacier at the Matterhorn, which sits 9.67 km away on a bearing of 266 degrees from it (summit node 26863664 on OpenStreetMap, read 2026-10-12, against the camera coordinates in our own catalogue). The mountain is west of the lens, the sun comes up behind it, and so this camera never shows you a sunrise. It shows you where the sunrise lands, which is the better half of the deal.
Five more cameras are worth the same half hour, the one before the sun clears the horizon where each of them stands. Every time below came from sunrise-sunset.org, queried this morning against each camera's own coordinates, for today and for Sunday, so you can see which way the week is going.
Gornergrat at 07:40, and the face that gets the light first
Sunrise on the ridge was 07:40 this morning and will be 07:48 on Sunday the 18th, with civil twilight starting at 07:12. The useful window is that half hour, when the sky behind the camera goes pale and the summit pyramid is the only lit thing in the frame.
I pulled a frame at 13:17 UTC today, which is mid-afternoon up there, so what it showed was the ordinary working version of the view: the station platform, the rack railway curving in from the left, a dozen people on the terrace, the Zooom building on the right, the glacier below in old snow, and the Matterhorn dead centre with the Weisshorn away to the right. The feed is listed at 150 seconds, so you get roughly 24 frames across the hour around sunrise. There is a second camera at the same coordinates on a 600 second cycle from the Swiss webcam feed, which is the one to use if you want the same view with less reloading.
Maine has the earliest of it until March
The National Park Service is blunt about this: "From October 7 to March 6, Cadillac Mountain is the first place in the country you can see the sun rise." That window opened five days ago, and the two Acadia cameras we carry both look at the ground it lands on rather than at the sun itself.
Jordan Pond is the better one, and this week it is extraordinary. The frame I pulled at 13:17 UTC carried its own stamp, 2026-10-12 09:16:32, with the temperature at 51F and the wind SSW at 5 mph: the lawn in front of the Jordan Pond House covered in green chairs and tables, the pond behind it, the Bubbles standing up at the far end, and the maples at the left edge in full orange. Sunrise there was 06:43 today and is 06:51 on Sunday, civil twilight at 06:15. The camera is on a 600 second cycle, which gives you about six frames in the hour the colour changes, so it rewards a slow look rather than a watch.
Twenty kilometres east, Winter Harbor points across Frenchman Bay at the Mount Desert Island hills from the Schoodic side, over a foreground of spruce tops. Sunrise is a minute earlier there, 06:42, and at 150 seconds it refreshes four times as often as Jordan Pond. If the first light is going to catch anything, it catches those hills across the water, and you are looking at them from the Atlantic side.
The road up to Bryce at 07:14
Sunrise at Bryce Canyon City was 07:33 this morning, with civil twilight at 07:08. The state camera at Main Street and Center stamped its frame 07:14 AM 10/12/2026, nineteen minutes before the sun, and it is a lovely thing: wet asphalt, every streetlight still on, the motel frontage lit along the right, a set of tail lights heading north up SR-63 towards the park entrance and a line of headlights coming the other way. People driving to the rim for sunrise, from a traffic camera, at 30 seconds a frame.
There is no public camera on the amphitheatre rim itself, so the hoodoos going pink is not something you can watch from here. The second Utah camera, at the SR-63 and SR-12 junction, is the same deal at the bottom of the road.
Yosemite Valley is lit from below first
Half Dome is the camera that makes the point about what first light is for. At 13:17 UTC, which is 06:17 in the valley, the frame was essentially black, with one cluster of lights low in the middle, on the valley floor, and nothing else except the Yosemite Conservancy mark in the corner. Civil twilight was still 21 minutes off and sunrise 46 minutes off, at 07:03. The face itself is 600 seconds between frames, so the sensible way to watch it is to open the page at civil twilight and come back twice.
Why Maui's sunrise hardly moves
Haleakalā is the one people actually get up for, and the camera is honest about the hour. The frame I pulled was stamped 03:13:59 HST 2026-10-12, which is about three minutes old at the time I fetched it: a black field with two stars in it and the lit edge of the summit pavement along the bottom, nothing more. The National Park Service runs it on a 600 second cycle and burns the clock into every frame, so you always know how fresh what you are looking at is.
Here is the part worth knowing if you are planning a week rather than a morning. Sunrise on the summit was 06:17:55 today and is 06:20:01 on Sunday, a drift of two minutes and six seconds across six days. On the Gornergrat ridge, over the same six days, sunrise moves eight minutes and five seconds later. The camera at 20.7 degrees north barely notices that it is October; the one at 46.0 degrees north is losing a minute and a half a day. Mornings go at different speeds depending on how far up the map you are, and two webcams and an almanac will show you that in about a minute.
What we will do with these
The times above are clock times, which means they are wrong the moment the clocks change, and the European and American changes do not fall on the same date. I would rather re-measure than let a post quietly go stale, so these six get re-queried after both changes and the numbers get updated in place.
The one I wanted and could not find was a desert rim at dawn. We have no camera at Uluru, none at Yulara, and none at Kata Tjuta as of today; the nearest live cameras in the Northern Territory are at Katherine and Darwin Airport. If you know of a public camera pointed at red rock at first light, anywhere, send it and I will add it.