This is what nerds like me do when they need to take a break from reading and homework. I've been wanting to put together this animation for a while but didn't know how to get the images I needed. Until today, that is. Thanks to timeanddate.com, I was able to "create" the images and then stitch them together into a movie.
The animation below shows where the sun is and is not shining on the Earth at noon Greenwich time over the course of one calendar year. The yellow dot in the middle is the sun and the white dot that quickly passes by is the moon. And, just to be clear, the light areas are where the sun is shining at that time of day and the dark areas are where it is not.
My wife and I spent several minutes watching the animation in a loop, mesmerized by it. I hope you enjoy it as well.
So what time of year is it at the beginning and the end of the loop? When is it that the sun reaches its northern most point?
ReplyDeleteWhy did you pick this to animate?
The animation begins on Jan 1, 2010 and runs for the whole calendar year. This means the sun starts near its southern-most point (winter solstice) and half-way through the animation arrives at its northern-most point, the summer solstice.
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole bunch of cool things you can deduce/learn from the animation related to this but you'll notice that about one-quarter and three-quarters of the way through the shadow lines over North America and Asia are vertical for an instant; these are the equinox points in the calendar. Also, at the solstice points, it is easy to find points in the appropriate hemisphere where the sun never rises or never sets.
As far as why I chose to animate this, well, I think I like seeing all the patterns and information about the solar calendar and length of days that the animation demonstrates. I could also make one showing how sunrise and sunset move across the face of the planet but I don't think it would be near as interesting as this.