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Sun Clock

sunclock.net

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Re: Sun Clock

#31

Post by fwipsy »

vesinisa wrote: post #27

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 (sta…

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.

Re: Sun Clock

#32

Post by duman »

zamadatix wrote: post #14

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

Re: Sun Clock

#34

Post by svennidal »

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.

Re: Sun Clock

#36

Post by cogogo »

layer8 wrote: post #28
vesinisa wrote: post #27

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 (sta…

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 n…

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.

Re: Sun Clock

#37

Post by carterschonwald »

mourner wrote: post #33

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 :)

Re: Sun Clock

#40

Post by mourner »

carterschonwald wrote: post #37
mourner wrote: post #33

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.
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