Sun is ascending

The Sun is ascending condition passes while the sun is climbing. This happens during the half of the day between solar midnight and solar noon when the sun’s elevation is increasing. Home Assistant works this out from your home location.

Use it to tell morning apart from afternoon without picking a clock time. For example, run a routine only while the sun is on its way up, regardless of the season.

Using this condition from the user interface

If you prefer building automations visually, Home Assistant walks you through this condition step by step. You pick what to check, tweak a few options, and save. No YAML knowledge required.

To use this condition in an automation:

1. Go to Settings > Automations & scenes.
2. Open an existing automation, or select Create automation > Create new automation.
3. In the And if section, select Add condition.
4. From the search box, search for and select Sun: Sun is ascending.
5. Select Save.

Using this condition in YAML

If you work directly in YAML, or you want to know exactly what Home Assistant does under the hood, this section has the technical reference. It lists the field names you use in YAML, their types, and which ones are required.

In YAML, refer to this condition as sun.is_ascending. It has no options:

condition: sun.is_ascending

This passes while the sun is rising toward solar noon.

Good to know

• This condition does not use a target. It checks the sun at your configured home location.
• Ascending covers the whole rising half of the day, from solar midnight up to solar noon, including the hours before sunrise. It is not limited to daylight. Combine it with Sun is up if you only want the rising daytime hours.
• For the opposite half of the day, use Sun is descending.

Try it yourself

Ready to test this? Go to Settings > Automations & scenes, open an automation, and add this condition. Trigger the automation with and without the condition met, and watch whether it continues or stops.

More examples

Real scenarios where this condition gates an automation. Copy any example and adapt it to your setup.

Automation: morning blinds only while the sun is rising

When the living room brightens past a threshold, raise the blinds, but only while the sun is still climbing, so an equally bright evening does not trigger it.

• Trigger: Living room illuminance rises above a threshold
• Condition: Sun: Sun is ascending
• Action: Open cover
  • Target: Living room blinds

alias: "Raise blinds on a bright morning"
triggers:
  - trigger: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.living_room_illuminance
    above: 5000
conditions:
  - condition: sun.is_ascending
actions:
  - action: cover.open_cover
    target:
      entity_id: cover.living_room_blinds

Still stuck?

The Home Assistant community is quick to help: join Discord for real-time chat, post on the community forum with the condition you’re using and what you expected to happen, or share on our subreddit /r/homeassistant.

Related conditions

These conditions work well alongside this one:

• Sun is descending: Tests if the sun is descending.

• Sun is up: Tests if the sun is up.

• It is morning twilight: Tests if it is morning twilight, optionally of a specific type.