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Sun Position Calculator

drajmarsh.bitbucket.io

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Sun Position Calculator

#11
post #9

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 aft…

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.

Re: Sun Position Calculator

#14
post #11
post #9

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 aft…

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.

I wonder what the physical toll on a man exprriencing three consecutive solar days?

Re: Sun Position Calculator

#17
post #15

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.

There's also https://shademap.app/ for that, also useful (with 3D buildings!). Used it before buying my condo and it was spot-on.

Re: Sun Position Calculator

#18
Cool demo!

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.)

Re: Sun Position Calculator

#20
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.
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