Last week end, I was playing with John Walker's Earth viewer, a seasoned tool that has been on the web for the better year of the past decade more or less unchanged, and as excellent throughout this entire time. Few services have that kind of life span on the web.
Anyway, I wanted to animate the sun's reach over the year, for a given time of day, over perhaps 25 frames spread evenly across the rest of the year, and loop it. Not a very difficult application to write, with Walker's service generating the actual imagery, so before long I had a working setup, peeking down at me from 20,000 kilometers above:
Sunlight over the year
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
If you are not particularly interested in the local daylight conditions where I live (chances are good you are not :-), you can always pick a more interesting spot on the face of the earth via my blog header, at least if you are reading this on my index page or on the day archive page, which feature that map. Just double click some spot on either of the map views in the blog header, and the globe will adjust to the new coordinates. Have fun!
i'm looking exactly for this thing. a map that shows the changing of the lenght of the over the year.
ReplyDeletesafly it doesn't work. not in firefox, nor in ie...
This code has suffered code rot, as did the mentioned blog header which integrated it with Google maps. Hacks like these are better off stand alone, but I won't fix that, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteIf it's any consolation, it works well enough to load the images, so you can save them manually from Firebug's Net view, with a bit of manual labour.