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Each sunrise and sunset gets a colour score out of 100, and the score falls into one of four bands:

• Dull (0 to 24): grey or blocked. The sun may not show at all.
• Mixed (25 to 44): some colour is possible, often patchy or brief.
• Good (45 to 69): a decent chance of warm colour in the clouds.
• Vivid (70 and up): the clouds are set up to light up. Worth going out for.

Colour needs two things. There has to be cloud high enough to catch the light, and the low sun needs a clear path to reach it. Glint looks at high, mid and low cloud and the chance of rain at the time of sunrise or sunset.

A thin layer of high cloud scores well. A thick bank of low cloud on the horizon, a solid grey lid or rain scores badly. A completely clear sky sits in between: pleasant, but there's nothing to light up.

The model is new and we're tuning it against what people tell us they saw. Any change to it is listed on What's new.

Cloud is hard to forecast, and weather models update several times a day. A score for three days away can move a lot by the evening itself. Glint checks five weather models and averages them, which smooths out one model's jumps, but it can't remove them.

Glint fetches fresh forecasts every half hour. Check again on the day for the best answer.

It tells you how far to trust the score. It's high when the five models agree and the sunrise or sunset is within two days. It drops when the models disagree, or when the event is more than two days away. A low-confidence Vivid is a reason to keep an eye on it, not to plan around it.

Glint knows about 700 viewpoints across Ireland and Britain, each picked because it faces sunrise, sunset or both. It shows the ones within about an hour's drive, and always at least five, even if that means going further.

A spot is only marked Worth the trip when its sky is in a better band than yours, at least 10 points higher, and you can drive there before the light goes. Drive times are estimates, so leave a little early.

Know a spot we've missed? Suggest it below.

Weather forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which brings together models from ECMWF, the Met Office, DWD, NOAA and Météo-France. Place names come from GeoNames, and viewpoint positions are checked against OpenStreetMap.

Very little. When you open Glint, it guesses your rough area from your internet connection, usually to the nearest town. It only uses your exact position if you tap Use my exact location, and we don't store it.

The places you search for are saved on your own device, not by us, and you can remove them. Your last place is also kept in a small cookie, so Glint opens there next time. If you tell us how a sunset looked, we keep the answer with the date and a position rounded to about 10 km. There are no accounts, no tracking and no ads.

If you send feedback with your email address, we only use it to reply. The privacy page has the details.

Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. If you search from one side of the Irish Sea, you'll see places on that side first.