Author of suncalc (the JS library behind the sun calculations) here — happy to see such a nice application of it! Heads up if the author's reading this — I recently released a major overhaul of the library that makes it a lot more precise: https://github.com/mourner/suncalc
Initially (about 15 years ago - it was my first ever open source library!) it was based on Astronomy Answers articles that are thankfully still live at https://www.aa.quae.nl/en/reken/zonpositie.html, but v2.0 specifically was rewritten to use the approach described in Jean Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms book.
I love it. It'd be nice if I could click points on a map and see the difference to my local one as well. Or in the calendar view if it'd show a copy of the clock (i.e. coloring not current hand positions) for the time I'm hovered over.
That’s actually pretty close to what I ended up building.
For the first one, I skipped the map and went with search + saved cities instead. All your saved places sit on the same 24-hour dial, so you can see the difference from your local time at a glance without doing the timezone math. The upside is that it works completely offline and fits nicely on Apple Watch too.
Your second suggestion is the part I only got halfway right. You can move the dial in 15-minute increments and the daylight/twilight colouring changes with it. There’s also a calendar where you can jump to any date and time and see what the solar state is in every saved city, but right now that’s shown in rows rather than by recolouring the clock itself.
I like your version better though, hovering/scrubbing a time and having the whole clock recolour for that moment would make a lot more sense. I’m going to add that to the list.
I've been wanting to build this exact clock for awhile now. My feature request would be to include a timeline at the bottom of the page that I can scroll back and forth through days of the year to see everything shift.
Neat. One of my favourite sites, which also shows daylight, is WeatherSpark[0], obviously focused on weather and it allows you to compare locations based on yearly rainfall, cloud cover, muggy conditions, all sorts of stuff. Always check it when going on vacation or relocating.
Nice. I made my solar clock here: svennidal.is/solarclock
I'm currently in Iceland and I've been using my clock as my main clock since the Icelandic clock is set to be almost one and half hour to early. I've never really shared it so that is why it's just hardcoded to my location haha.
It must be clock-making time... I built a 24-hour clock a few days ago but in base-12 and with 72 seconds per minute (to reuse the outer 24-hour dial, with 3 subdivisions to make it closer to the normal second)
I have this hard-coded to south dakota, but it looks like this and I made it a while ago. Same idea, except I turn it such that "solar noon" is at the top.
Think 12 noon is really "high noon" or solar noon? Nope, not unless you are in the center of a timezone!
The objective time of "local noon" also varies due to the Earth's orbit not being a perfect circle, and the Earth's axis being tilted with respect to the plane of its orbit. The variance is described by the equation of time:
Or one of those places that ignores its assigned time zone.
There are places in the western U.S. where entire towns operate on their own time, and the only place you'll find a "correct" clock is in the Post Office. Not even in City Hall.
One weird thing: the author of this clock/calendar portrays the year rotating clockwise (click on the calendar icon in top left to see the "annual" calendar): January in 12 to 1 o'clock, February in 1 to 2 o'clock, etc. and December in 11 to 12 o'clock.
In a poll of some close friends recently, we found out that most of us (>80% including myself) had always mentalized the year rotating counter-clockwise (starting from January at 12 to 11 o'clock, Februay at 10 to 11 o'clock etc. and finally December in 1 to 12 o'clock.)
Bizarely none of us could explain why we had such weird anti-clockwise mental image of the annual cycle, but all who viusalized the year running counter-clockwise said they had done so for as long as they could remember.
Interesting, I don’t have a circular mental image of the year at all. It’s more like a continuous line — the summers are light and the winters are dark(er) — where the previous year doesn’t coincide with the next year. Same for the week (and the month, but the months have different lengths anyway). Also not for the day, which takes two revolutions of the clock. Does anyone visualize the day as two circles? Probably not.
Agree. This is the first time I had thought about it this way and the clock representation seems fine.
Oddly the year is the only thing where I think I have a good 3D mental model without really thinking about it. Not sure if this makes sense to others but right now we are about 11/12ths of the way to the autumnal equinox and you can imagine the Earth’s tilted axis almost perpendicular to the arriving sunlight. I think of this as if I were observing from the sun so the axis is pointing up (north) to the left.
I visualize the year clockwise, but with summer at the top, and the new year at the 6 o'clock position. I'm not sure why, but I think it just makes more sense to me to think of spring as rising, and "fall" as descending. I guess that convention would work better in the southern hemisphere.
Nice. I've been making a version of this that I submitted to ycombinator, testing the thesis "If we schedule our life around the sun including afternoon naps" we perform better.
Check it out and give me feedback. It has a long ways to go.
Author of suncalc (the JS library behind the sun calculations) here — happy to see such a nice application of it! Heads up if the author's reading this — I recently released a major overhaul of the library that makes it a lot more precise: https://github.com/mourner/suncalc
what sorts of background texts/sources of info did you use?
edit: i think i have the dover book your readme mentions :)
Initially (about 15 years ago - it was my first ever open source library!) it was based on Astronomy Answers articles that are thankfully still live at https://www.aa.quae.nl/en/reken/zonpositie.html, but v2.0 specifically was rewritten to use the approach described in Jean Meeus' Astronomical Algorithms book.
I love it. It'd be nice if I could click points on a map and see the difference to my local one as well. Or in the calendar view if it'd show a copy of the clock (i.e. coloring not current hand positions) for the time I'm hovered over.
That’s actually pretty close to what I ended up building.
For the first one, I skipped the map and went with search + saved cities instead. All your saved places sit on the same 24-hour dial, so you can see the difference from your local time at a glance without doing the timezone math. The upside is that it works completely offline and fits nicely on Apple Watch too.
Your second suggestion is the part I only got halfway right. You can move the dial in 15-minute increments and the daylight/twilight colouring changes with it. There’s also a calendar where you can jump to any date and time and see what the solar state is in every saved city, but right now that’s shown in rows rather than by recolouring the clock itself.
I like your version better though, hovering/scrubbing a time and having the whole clock recolour for that moment would make a lot more sense. I’m going to add that to the list.
I’m the developer, btw: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797192832
This is the author's account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=perilunar
Also made something like this called Sun Path which tracks where the sun is through centuries and how the path deviates ever so slowly.
Plus there are all the equinoxes and solstices.
https://pilgrimapp.org/sunpath/
Dragging the globe around isn't working on touch; it feels like it's missing touch-action: none
Thanks for the note. I just fixed it.
I've been wanting to build this exact clock for awhile now. My feature request would be to include a timeline at the bottom of the page that I can scroll back and forth through days of the year to see everything shift.
Neat. One of my favourite sites, which also shows daylight, is WeatherSpark[0], obviously focused on weather and it allows you to compare locations based on yearly rainfall, cloud cover, muggy conditions, all sorts of stuff. Always check it when going on vacation or relocating.
[0] https://weatherspark.com/
Been using https://sundial.page recently for weather
Nice. I made my solar clock here: svennidal.is/solarclock
I'm currently in Iceland and I've been using my clock as my main clock since the Icelandic clock is set to be almost one and half hour to early. I've never really shared it so that is why it's just hardcoded to my location haha.
It must be clock-making time... I built a 24-hour clock a few days ago but in base-12 and with 72 seconds per minute (to reuse the outer 24-hour dial, with 3 subdivisions to make it closer to the normal second)
https://jasonincanada.github.io/24-hour-base-12-clock.html#w...
interesting
https://editor.p5js.org/rhemalinder/full/im3tyPBDW - I made this one for myself and it's pretty similar.
I have this hard-coded to south dakota, but it looks like this and I made it a while ago. Same idea, except I turn it such that "solar noon" is at the top.
Think 12 noon is really "high noon" or solar noon? Nope, not unless you are in the center of a timezone!
The objective time of "local noon" also varies due to the Earth's orbit not being a perfect circle, and the Earth's axis being tilted with respect to the plane of its orbit. The variance is described by the equation of time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
> Nope, not unless you are in the center of a timezone!
… and you do not live with daylight saving time.
Or one of those places that ignores its assigned time zone.
There are places in the western U.S. where entire towns operate on their own time, and the only place you'll find a "correct" clock is in the Post Office. Not even in City Hall.
Let me choose location manually.
I wish my browser let me do this by default. Rather than "let this site know your location?" it should be "select a location to give to this site".
(I'm sure there are extensions and/or developer options that do this, but it's the default I want)
You can set latitude and longitude after opening settings with the gear icon.
you can use my version sunsignal.app and enter a zip code.
Love it!
One weird thing: the author of this clock/calendar portrays the year rotating clockwise (click on the calendar icon in top left to see the "annual" calendar): January in 12 to 1 o'clock, February in 1 to 2 o'clock, etc. and December in 11 to 12 o'clock.
In a poll of some close friends recently, we found out that most of us (>80% including myself) had always mentalized the year rotating counter-clockwise (starting from January at 12 to 11 o'clock, Februay at 10 to 11 o'clock etc. and finally December in 1 to 12 o'clock.)
Bizarely none of us could explain why we had such weird anti-clockwise mental image of the annual cycle, but all who viusalized the year running counter-clockwise said they had done so for as long as they could remember.
Interesting, I don’t have a circular mental image of the year at all. It’s more like a continuous line — the summers are light and the winters are dark(er) — where the previous year doesn’t coincide with the next year. Same for the week (and the month, but the months have different lengths anyway). Also not for the day, which takes two revolutions of the clock. Does anyone visualize the day as two circles? Probably not.
Agree. This is the first time I had thought about it this way and the clock representation seems fine.
Oddly the year is the only thing where I think I have a good 3D mental model without really thinking about it. Not sure if this makes sense to others but right now we are about 11/12ths of the way to the autumnal equinox and you can imagine the Earth’s tilted axis almost perpendicular to the arriving sunlight. I think of this as if I were observing from the sun so the axis is pointing up (north) to the left.
I visualize the year clockwise, but with summer at the top, and the new year at the 6 o'clock position. I'm not sure why, but I think it just makes more sense to me to think of spring as rising, and "fall" as descending. I guess that convention would work better in the southern hemisphere.
Did you go to the same elementary school?
This is great. Reminds me of the Solar Dial watch face on my Apple Watch.
Neat! I made something similar to better visualize timezones based off the day/night cycle:
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/sun-timezone/id6760567372
It'd be neat if you could pan a slider through the year to see the sunrise sunset times change
I would prefer if it showed a regular 12 hours clock face and show the upcoming sunrise or sunset, or two faces one for each.
This is neat! Would love the ability to make "true noon" be at the top of the clock, instead of 12.
Nice. I've been making a version of this that I submitted to ycombinator, testing the thesis "If we schedule our life around the sun including afternoon naps" we perform better.
Check it out and give me feedback. It has a long ways to go.
https://sunsignal.app
nice one
Man fuck Apple for not allowing custom Apple Watch faces >:(
Always the crippled operating system limiting the potential of their amazing hardware
The “Solar Dial” face does pretty much what the site does.
This is already my default watch face on Apple Watch