We’re pleased to share that we’ve made some changes to the hebcal website to better accommodate world cities. If you visit our Shabbat Times page, you’ll see hundreds of new cities available for candle-lighting times.
You may notice that candle-lighting times have changed by 1-3 minutes as well. This is due to a change in the sunset calculation algorithm we’ve introduced as well. Sunset times are estimated from latitude and longitude, and generally have an accuracy of +/- 2 minutes except at extreme north or south latitudes. This new algorithm is more accurate than the previous one.
If you’ve been using Hebcal.com to calculate candle-lighting times via latitude and longitude, you might find your city listed in our database. If it’s not there, feel free to drop us a line. If you’d like to continue to specify your location by latitude and longitude, please note that we are now using standard timezone names (such as “America/Chicago” or “Asia/Jerusalem”) instead of GMT offsets + daylight-saving-time rules.