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.
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!
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.
The objective time of ")ocal 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:
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 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.
Thanks for posting this, I remember seeing it somewhere some time ago but didn't bookamrk the site and couldn't remember the name. It has some very nice plots (and city comparison) for data freaks like myself :-)
One weird thing: the author of this clock portrays the year rotating clockwise (click on 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 picture day cycle in a single 24 hr counterclockwise loop. I’m always interested to learn about other people’s internal mental image frameworks! So fascinating.
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.
Right. If viewed with the north pole up, Earth indeed rotates counterclockwise around the Sun. Not sure if it would be any different for someone living on the southern hemisphere though, as all the maps used globally have the North up and the South down.
I picture annual calendar the almost the same way (counterclockwise), although its an asymmetrical oval, and months have associated colors (i.e. December navy blue, January maroon/brown, February ice blue, March true maroon…August golden or wheat yellow). I don’t know why, but that’s been my mental image since childhood.
I actually have exactly a clock as a mental model of the year and the seasons. December is 12 o' clock.
But weirdly, I dont have a mind's clock to represent the day. Precisely because it feels to me that the clock shape is unfit to show time. Because 03:00am feels wildly different from 03:00pm. My mental representation is a 3d spiral slightly offset and looping back on itself. So imagine two clockfaces when looking from up top, seethrough. The bottom one is a bit to the left so you can see both well. Each consecutive number goes a bit higher. After 12 midnight the numbers quickly decend down back to 06:00am. I have this image for as long as.I remember.
I wonder if that's a common thing generally or not. Definitely I should add it as an option though. Also whether the year starts at the top or bottom of the dial.
Yes, this has to be where the picture originates. Given that almost all maps show the north facing up, picturing the Earth rotating anti-clockwise around the Sun throughout the year makes sense. A bit similar to how clocks for the times of day run clockwise probably because this aligns with the rotation of a sundial placed in the Northern hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere, a sundial runs anti-clockwise.
Although, converse arguments can be made for both - even if we assume an observer located in the north. If we do indeed picture the Earth rotating in space from the outside - it actually rotates counterclockwise around its axis with the north up. So should day clocks actually run "backwards"? And the "fixed" background of distant stars seem to rotate around a northern observer in the clockwise direction throughout the year - so the image of the year rotating clockwise is just as correct.
Everything seems relative to the prespective chosen.
Author of suncalc 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 did a similar one recently but have not been able to validate it's calculations against any other source. Thanks for posting the link to yours when I get time I'll compare and see if they match up. https://git.mikedilger.com/mikedilger/sunangle
I just used Suncalc yesterday to add Sunrise/Sunset and Golden Hour to my PebbleOS NOAA Radar watchface[1]. Thank you for an amazing library; It's the first that I reach for every time I have a project with this need.
I am working on a clock app that keeps time the Roman Empire way (every day has twelve hours that start at sunrise and end at sunset, so the duration of each hour changes slightly each day), so this library would be extremely helpful. Thank you!
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 looks like the "golden hour" may be hardcoded as the hour before sunset. May I suggest updating it to be based on the sun's position in the sky?
In high-northern latitudes, the sun can stay close to the horizon for long stretches during the day depending on the season. For example, in Iceland in the spring and fall, the golden hour lasts for most of the day - amazing for photography and just enjoying the scenery.
Very nifty little app. It is such a standard thing nowadays, but the dynamic UI rescaling (to a point anyway) makes it nice to stick on the side and watch as the sun goes down. Kudos to the dev.
94 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] thread(I'm sure there are extensions and/or developer options that do this, but it's the default I want)
I'm certainly not giving my exact GNSS coordinates to any random scrote who askes for them. Frankly I'm amazed some people do this.
Always the crippled operating system limiting the potential of their amazing hardware
Check it out and give me feedback. It has a long ways to go.
https://sunsignal.app
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!
… and if you do not live with daylight saving time.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
https://jasonincanada.github.io/24-hour-base-12-clock.html#w...
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
Plus there are all the equinoxes and solstices.
https://pilgrimapp.org/sunpath/
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/sun-timezone/id6760567372
[0] https://weatherspark.com/
One weird thing: the author of this clock portrays the year rotating clockwise (click on 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.
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.
But weirdly, I dont have a mind's clock to represent the day. Precisely because it feels to me that the clock shape is unfit to show time. Because 03:00am feels wildly different from 03:00pm. My mental representation is a 3d spiral slightly offset and looping back on itself. So imagine two clockfaces when looking from up top, seethrough. The bottom one is a bit to the left so you can see both well. Each consecutive number goes a bit higher. After 12 midnight the numbers quickly decend down back to 06:00am. I have this image for as long as.I remember.
Although, converse arguments can be made for both - even if we assume an observer located in the north. If we do indeed picture the Earth rotating in space from the outside - it actually rotates counterclockwise around its axis with the north up. So should day clocks actually run "backwards"? And the "fixed" background of distant stars seem to rotate around a northern observer in the clockwise direction throughout the year - so the image of the year rotating clockwise is just as correct.
Everything seems relative to the prespective chosen.
edit: i think i have the dover book your readme mentions :)
1. https://apps.repebble.com/2029ab9c84f946e1b125f8e0
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.
In high-northern latitudes, the sun can stay close to the horizon for long stretches during the day depending on the season. For example, in Iceland in the spring and fall, the golden hour lasts for most of the day - amazing for photography and just enjoying the scenery.
Its really weather over the next 12 hours on the primary ring, and day/night transition on the inner.
https://donohoe.dev/weather/