17 May
Looking for the perfect spot to watch the children's parade at 10?
Then you are in luck. At 10am on 17 May the sun comes almost exactly straight up Karl Johans gate — 37 degrees above the horizon, from the south-east, along the street rather than across it. That is why very nearly the whole route is lit at once, and why the palace facade takes the light full in the face while the royal family waves.
The sun at 10am
We worked out the sun's position over Oslo on 17 May at 10.00 Norwegian time, with the same code Soltreff uses in every report it makes: azimuth 118 degrees (clockwise from true north, so 0 is north and 90 is east) and 37 degrees above the horizon.
Karl Johans gate runs at 299 degrees — that is 119 degrees if you stand at Jernbanetorget and look up towards the palace. The sun at 10am sits one degree off that line. It comes from directly behind you as you walk up towards the palace.
That is not a curiosity, it is the whole answer to where you should stand. When the sun lies along a street instead of across it, the rows of buildings do not throw shade into the street — they throw it along themselves. We measured it: across 80 points on the carriageway, along the whole of Karl Johans gate, at eye height 1.7 metres, 79 are in direct sun at 10am. The one that is not sits where the horizon in the sun's direction reaches 37.1 degrees — a tenth of a degree above the sun. That is inside the sun disc's own width, so strictly that point is a tie rather than shade. The tightest of the other 79 has 5.6 degrees to spare — twenty times the disc's own radius — so the rest are nowhere near borderline.
So neither side of the street is the “right” one at 10am. It is a rare situation, and it does not last long.
Is the balcony in sun?
Yes. And the direction is worth establishing, because it is not the one people guess: the palace's front faces south-east, not east. We derived the facades from the building's own outline and got three wall surfaces at 120.0, 120.0 and 120.1 degrees — a good hundred metres of wall in total, all pointing the same way. The front looks straight down Karl Johans gate, to within about a degree.
The sun at 10am sits between 1.9 and 2.1 degrees from the direction those three surfaces face. It strikes the front almost square on. The horizon seen from the facade is between 1.2 and 2.8 degrees in the sun's direction — that is the park and Slottsplassen, sloping down and away — while the sun stands at 37. Nothing is in the way, at any height we calculated. The balcony is in sun.
And at noon?
By then it has turned. At 12.00 the sun stands at 154 degrees and 47 degrees up: it has swung 36 degrees south and no longer lies along the street but at an angle across it. The same 80 points on the carriageway now give 58 in sun and 22 in shade — the row of buildings on the south side has begun to lay shade inwards. The palace facade is still lit at every height above ground level, but the ground plan of two of the three front wall surfaces has fallen into shade from the palace's own projecting wings.
What we actually calculated — and what this is not
This is not a Soltreff report. The figures above come from a run of the same code that makes all our reports, but the palace is not an address the service answers for, and you will not find it by looking it up. We say so plainly rather than letting it look like something it is not.
Why the service does not answer for Slottsplassen 1. Two reasons, and both are honest. Our building outlines are fetched as ways from OpenStreetMap, but the palace is drawn as a relation — several ways assembled into one surface — so there is simply no outline for it in our data. The address therefore stands as “unmatched”. And even with an outline the building would fall outside: in Matrikkelen it is registered as building type 311, not a dwelling, and Soltreff only calculates dwellings. For this page we fetched the palace's own outline from the same OpenStreetMap API, and ran it through the ordinary calculation.
What we do not know. The palace has no registered dwellings, so the storey heights are derived from the roof height with our default value — which gives nine nominal levels for a house that has three real ones. The balcony's own height is not in any register we read. It makes no difference to the answer here: the horizon in front of the facade is under three degrees at all of those heights, and the sun stands at 37, so the front is in sun whichever of them the balcony sits at. Had the answer depended on the height, we could not have given it.
The conventions. Geometric sun for the sun's centre, no cloud — we know nothing about the weather on 17 May. The sun is a disc a good half-degree across, not a point, so the changeover between sun and shade is soft by a couple of minutes either way (the method explains why). That is why the figures here come with their margin: 35 degrees of clearance on the palace facade absorbs that softness without trouble, a tenth of a degree in the street does not. Times are Norwegian local time, with summer time. The elevation model is Kartverket's laser scan of 18 May 2024, with leaves on the trees. If we recalculate the algorithm, we recalculate this page too.
Privacy. The palace is a public building with no registered dwellings, and the parade route is a public street. There is no resident to consider here, as with the two museum homes. That is also why this page is the third and last address with figures in its text: every other sun figure on Soltreff is for a home someone lives in, and those stay in the report, which is not indexed.
Check your own view
If you are watching the parade from a window or a balcony in the centre, Soltreff can answer for that exact address — floor, wall and moment. The link below opens the service at Akersgata 18, a residential building a block from the route, with the moment already set to 17 May at 10.00, so you can see what the moment view does. What it answers there stays in the report and not here: we calculate homes people live in, and we do not put their figure on a page that can be searched.
See 17 May at 10am at a real address →
For now we cover Oslo. The rest of Norway is coming.
Elevation data: © Kartverket's laser scan, flown 18 May 2024 (CC BY 4.0 / NLOD). Building data: © Matrikkelen, the public register of buildings and addresses (NLOD). Building outlines and street lines: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).