There a street in Manhattan that, during a certain time of year the light shines all the way down the grid of buildings. Here's the link to that moment
Shameless plug: been working on https://www.streethenge.com for sometime. You type in a street and it shows whether the sun ever aligns with it at sunrise or sunset, and when (date, time, compass bearing). Works with the moon as well.
It works for any street, and there's an add to calendar button for the next alignment. One warning: street lookups go through public OSM APIs, so the occasional query can time out due to api limits. I haven't figured out what to do about that yet without exponentially increasing the size of the app.
illithid0 1 days ago [-]
This is great. I would love a way to simulate something like possible tree placement and how much shade that may generate over the years. There are some parts of my area that are, despite being cut out of a forest, devoid of trees but are supposed to be "outdoor shared spaces".
Full sun all day at a dog park in August, for example, just isn't a place I want to be.
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
Site maintainer here. There is a polygon drawing tool in the upper right corner of the map. You can use it to draw polygons on the map and assign them a height. The shadows will update instantly. You can use it to add buildings that are missing from the map, simulate a tree placement or even simulate cutting down a tree if you set the height to 0.
illithid0 1 days ago [-]
Wow! Can't believe I missed this. Thank you.
km3r 1 days ago [-]
My friends and I used this for a camping party's solar panel's placement (for charging a battery). A large campsite with intermixed trees makes it hard to find the optimal spot on our own, but this map helped us keep the party going late into the night before we needed to turn on the generator.
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
Nice. I'm really proud of how fast the annual sunlight calculation is for a location but it def needs better UX.
madaxe_again 11 hours ago [-]
And I for placing a permanent solar array - I live in a deep, steep valley with a broad range of topography, and it helped me find an optimal spot for year-round balance of shade.
1 days ago [-]
toasty228 9 hours ago [-]
FYI things too far out of the current viewport don't cast shadows, can be annoying for mountains/hills are sun down/set if you're not aware of it.
scrumper 11 hours ago [-]
Curious how it knows my location despite Safari not prompting and no location services indicator in my menu bar. (Mac, not iOS).
I'm not suggesting anything nefarious but it is odd.
Nice app/service though well done.
wongarsu 10 hours ago [-]
Based on the location I got it guesses the location from the IP. The accuracy of that varies wildly by country and ISP. The US is a place where it is usually accurate to the city level
scrumper 6 hours ago [-]
Aha thanks. I'm using a different computer and I mistakenly thought I had Private Relay switched on; it's not enabled on this machine. Turning it on gives expected results. Needed the IP reminder to figure that out!
foco_tubi 1 days ago [-]
This doesn't look particularly accurate, at least not relative to what I can see right now out my window.
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
Website creator/maintainer here. Happy to try and diagnose the error if you elaborate on what the discrepancy is (tree, building, hill, etc)...
Gallows4574 1 days ago [-]
Very cool tool! It's generally accurate, but, there are spots showing shadows where there are no trees or anything at all to cast a shadow, and missing several spots where there are actually trees.
It's missing a 40' tall ash, a 40' tall maple, and all four 30' tall blue spruce. So they're not exactly small trees. Our septic field is showing as in shadow all day even though there are no trees near it. That shadow doesn't move at all like the rest so I'm not sure what it's detecting.
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
Sorry about that. The current tree estimate is done via computer vision but I am working on migrating to LiDAR backed data which should eliminate false positives.
Just waiting for the TBs and TBs of data to download and then this Macbook M4 is going to make some heat...
blargwill 14 hours ago [-]
Hi! I've recently made a shade calculator specifically for climbs in North wales:
It's important for me to use accurate height-maps as (obviously) the terrain is very three dimensional.
Are you using the public LiDAR data as well?
foco_tubi 1 days ago [-]
Hi there! My office window faces east and this morning, your map showed shade from the building across the street (correct), as well as shade from my building on the lawn below my window (incorrect).
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for the reply. Do you have a tree or bush outside your window? I estimate where tree shadows fall but it's not super accurate. In the settings dialog you can toggle, "below canopy", "above canopy" or disable tree shadows altogether.
fxwin 1 days ago [-]
I've seen the setting, and I've seen that you suggest toggling it when tree shadows seem inaccurate, can you elaborate on what that setting does exactly?
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
"Top of canopy" - view from above like looking down from an airplane window. You won't see any shadows looking down on a forest because you only see sunlight landing on the top of the canopy. Most accurate.
"Below canopy" - what shadows would look like on the ground. If you're in a dense forest everything is in shadow because the trees obscure the sun. I guesstimate how big and where the below canopy shadows land. Any vegetation that's more than 2 meters tall, I place a shaded area beneath it. Not super accurate because it treats trees like cylinders instead of a sphere/triangle on top of a cylinder.
"No trees" - only building and terrain shadows are shown on the map.
fxwin 15 hours ago [-]
Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but what's the difference between "top of canopy" and "No trees" then?
1 days ago [-]
foco_tubi 1 days ago [-]
Toggling to no canopy fixes it - palm trees cast little to no shade
blargwill 14 hours ago [-]
Would just like to say thank you so much for this tool! Ended up finding a quieter park to watch the eclipse last night.
procflora 1 days ago [-]
I've seen and loved this before but only today I thought to zoom all the way out and see the true terminator affected by elevation. We usually only seen the idealized smooth curve. Very neat!
22 hours ago [-]
tonym128 24 hours ago [-]
This is so awesome, really really well done on the UI and UX.
Ha! A friend and I had this idea ages ago when living in Austin. I actually have the domain “walkdarkly.com” registered for it, in case I ever got around to it. If somebody actually doing something with it wants the domain, I’m happy to talk about transferring it
schobi 15 hours ago [-]
This hints at a hiking trip planner maybe?
Depending on time of day and year evaluate a path to be in the direct sun/shade?
In summer, I might want to avoid the direct sun. Suggest the hiking path with least direct sunshine. And if it is autumn already, then please suggest a hiking path to be in the sun all day.
Might be a cool feature to compare hiking paths by percentage of direct sunshine.
But maybe, selecting a path through a forest vs. across open fields might already do.
echoangle 23 hours ago [-]
I don’t know if the building data is from OSM but some of the buildings in my area are not high enough at all and therefore only make a really small shadow. It’s off by a factor of 3 or so.
tppiotrowski 23 hours ago [-]
Building data comes from OvertureMaps data which is a superset of OSM. I update the building data set each month so if you make changes in OSM they should show up on ShadeMap at latest 30 days later.
nullhole 20 hours ago [-]
Factor of 3 sounds like a feet-metres unit error
jborichevskiy 1 days ago [-]
I've wanted something like this - in Boulder the foothills cast a shadow on the town considerably earlier than sunset provided by weather apps. So in theory, this should be possible to figure out when a park will actually see a sunset. Nice work!
stilldavid 1 days ago [-]
One of my favorite apps is PeakFinder, it shows local topography in an AR style UI. It also shows where and when the sun will set given the mountains around you! Well worth the few bucks.
dewey 1 days ago [-]
Agreed! It's one of these apps (Similar to Flightradar) that just feel like a great use of technology and add a little bit of joy.
jborichevskiy 1 days ago [-]
Definitely one of my favorites too! In my experience though it's best used at the location you're expecting the sunset, tricky to see when a specific point elsewhere will have their sunset (it may have changed though, I should check this)
Very nice! I’ve built something similar for Berlin[1] which is based on a digital surface model to also accurately cast shadows from trees, hills and bushes.
it exists since many years with this French website
cadamsdotcom 1 days ago [-]
Had a quick go of it on mobile.
That version has major UX issues unfortunately.
pavon 1 days ago [-]
Be sure to check out the different layers. In addition to the default which shows shade at a given moment, there are also options for hours of sun in given day, and an a UI to quickly show shade at any day/time of year.
andybak 1 days ago [-]
According to this my garden is almost entirely in the shade but I have a suntan to disprove it.
Not specifically for eclipses but has been useful in finding places where the sun will be visible during the current eclipse since the eclipse will occur when the sun is quite low on the horizon.
beezlewax 1 days ago [-]
I used this to check if I could see today's eclipse in Barcelona from my apartment buildings roof. Worked pretty well.
utopcell 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't. I went to Saragoza in Spain, at 8:30pm on August 12 to verify. Cool project nonetheless.
culebron21 1 days ago [-]
I see only a grey rectangle and a hand cursor.
tppiotrowski 1 days ago [-]
The map likely geolocated you somewhere without buildings (or maybe in the ocean) and where it is the middle of the night (so everything is in shadow).
Try this link which shows the shadows at the Space Needle in Seattle WA today at 5pm:
Unfortunately, it kind of hides that it is doing that, which sucks. Usually the required attribution is placed in a corner of the map. Shade Map has a little information-i there which does appear to list OpenStreetMap according to my browser's dev-tools, but it seems to be broken and gets hidden behind other page elements, so only '© Shade Map |' is visible.
^
There a street in Manhattan that, during a certain time of year the light shines all the way down the grid of buildings. Here's the link to that moment
https://shademap.app/@40.7426,-73.9841,13.48594z,17839875468...
Here's the page for Manhattanhenge: https://www.streethenge.com/henge/new-york
It works for any street, and there's an add to calendar button for the next alignment. One warning: street lookups go through public OSM APIs, so the occasional query can time out due to api limits. I haven't figured out what to do about that yet without exponentially increasing the size of the app.
Full sun all day at a dog park in August, for example, just isn't a place I want to be.
I'm not suggesting anything nefarious but it is odd.
Nice app/service though well done.
It's missing a 40' tall ash, a 40' tall maple, and all four 30' tall blue spruce. So they're not exactly small trees. Our septic field is showing as in shadow all day even though there are no trees near it. That shadow doesn't move at all like the rest so I'm not sure what it's detecting.
Just waiting for the TBs and TBs of data to download and then this Macbook M4 is going to make some heat...
https://connies.club/shade/12083/holyhead-mountain
It's important for me to use accurate height-maps as (obviously) the terrain is very three dimensional.
Are you using the public LiDAR data as well?
"Below canopy" - what shadows would look like on the ground. If you're in a dense forest everything is in shadow because the trees obscure the sun. I guesstimate how big and where the below canopy shadows land. Any vegetation that's more than 2 meters tall, I place a shaded area beneath it. Not super accurate because it treats trees like cylinders instead of a sphere/triangle on top of a cylinder.
"No trees" - only building and terrain shadows are shown on the map.
I love the game like pixel perfect shadow maps.
I made a similar site last year - https://tonym128.github.io/peakylight/peakylight.html and used ray casting
In summer, I might want to avoid the direct sun. Suggest the hiking path with least direct sunshine. And if it is autumn already, then please suggest a hiking path to be in the sun all day.
Might be a cool feature to compare hiking paths by percentage of direct sunshine.
But maybe, selecting a path through a forest vs. across open fields might already do.
[1]: https://sunsit.io/
it exists since many years with this French website
That version has major UX issues unfortunately.
Has has existed for many years
Try this link which shows the shadows at the Space Needle in Seattle WA today at 5pm:
https://shademap.app/@47.61991,-122.34913,15.43536z,17865792...
Or look at the shadows of the Alps at sunrise:
https://shademap.app/@45.46158,6.45036,7.47555z,178633748245...