I notice that the stars don't seem to be rendered correctly. If you zoom out, you can see the sun's position relative to the stars. As you scroll the date slider through the course of a year, the sun should make a complete 360-degree revolution around the ecliptic. Or, when the camera view is locked to the sun, the stars should appear to revolve relative to the sun.
Instead, the sun appears motionless against the stars, regardless of the time of year. (If the demo used actual star positions, I would be able to point to how the sun was in the wrong constellation for a given date. But the starfield is randomly generated, so you have to actually observe the sun in motion to see the bug.)
Relatedly, has anyone seen tooling or approaches to calculate shadows behind particular hills and mountains, depending on the season and time of day? The sunset calculation for Boulder Colorado is quite inaccurate as we are in the foothills with mountains to the west. I've been pondering how to calculate this precisely.
Given the mountains, the sun would appear to set when it descends below some altitude angle. Given the equation in the wikipedia article you'd then just solve for the hour angle. (You'd then have to use your latitude to convert the local solar time to Mountain Standard Time.)
Some friends flew eastwards from New York to Singapore on a direct flight (it's one of the longest flights). I wondered what their experience of sunrises and sunsets were (they departed 10PM), I've noted down the times but haven't plotted it...
Later this year I'm flying from Europe to the West Coast of Canada, and it seems I'll be in daylight for the entirity of the flight (departing 2PM local, landing 4PM local after a 10 hour flight).
I flew from central US to western asia (via moscow) and it was an interesting experience for the reasons you mentioned. I think I left early Saturday morning local time and arrived Sunday evening local time. I saw a sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset in 18 hours of travel time.
Neat. Similar to https://www.suncalc.org, which also lets you zoom to the neighborhood level. Very useful to figure out when/where sunlight will hit your house.
I've been wanting to make a little circadian rhythm graphic based on the sun, would love to have a graphic like this to support it. If Andrew Marsh is listening, would love to create something to extend what I have (Preview at sun-taupe.vercel.app)
This is really cool! The clock on your page reminded me too of some sites that show a "real solar" time based on your location where solar noon corresponds to 12:00 PM.
Amazing visualizer!
I notice that the stars don't seem to be rendered correctly. If you zoom out, you can see the sun's position relative to the stars. As you scroll the date slider through the course of a year, the sun should make a complete 360-degree revolution around the ecliptic. Or, when the camera view is locked to the sun, the stars should appear to revolve relative to the sun.
Instead, the sun appears motionless against the stars, regardless of the time of year. (If the demo used actual star positions, I would be able to point to how the sun was in the wrong constellation for a given date. But the starfield is randomly generated, so you have to actually observe the sun in motion to see the bug.)
Given the mountains, the sun would appear to set when it descends below some altitude angle. Given the equation in the wikipedia article you'd then just solve for the hour angle. (You'd then have to use your latitude to convert the local solar time to Mountain Standard Time.)
Later this year I'm flying from Europe to the West Coast of Canada, and it seems I'll be in daylight for the entirity of the flight (departing 2PM local, landing 4PM local after a 10 hour flight).
Edit: well, FR24 has a handy flight tracking that includes the daylight progression: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/sq23#3de5a306
So they flew 18 hours and experienced a full daylight cycle, arriving just before the second sunrise...
Thanks for the find!
https://www.nrel.gov/grid/solar-resource/solpos