EARTHLIGHT

Earthlight

Earthlight is the name for sunlight that Earth reflects back into space — the soft glow that fills the unlit part of a crescent Moon. It is light that has already touched the whole planet once.

Earthlight is an interactive artwork about Earth’s water, land, light and scale. It combines a navigable globe with selected cartographic, hydrographic and astronomical material to create a place for looking, drifting and discovery.

The core artwork runs locally from bundled imagery and data, without an account or telemetry. Its water shapes are a curated cartographic selection, not a complete inventory. Depth, area, volume and elevation appear where source material is available and should be read as context within the artwork, not as a scientific survey.

Drag to spin, pinch or scroll to move closer, tap a place for details, search cities and water by name, region, country or coordinates, or leave Ambient mode running and watch the composition drift. Borders, grids, labels, time, clouds and camera behavior can be layered or removed to change the reading of the piece.

Land study shades ground by physical terrain only — height, gradient, which way a slope faces, the Sun on that face now, how close mapped water is, and historical land cover. It uses the same fixed regional elevation grid everywhere (≈9.8 km north–south). Its slope is regional character, not a building plot. NASA MODIS IGBP 2024 cover is an annual classification, displayed at ≈4.9–9.8 km depending on device, not current ground truth. Earthlight holds no parcel boundaries, ownership, zoning, land price, legal buildability, flood designation, soil survey, utility, access or seismic data, and nothing in that layer is any of those. It is a place to start looking, not a basis for a decision about property.

Place names come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0): about 516,000 populated places in 248 countries, down to settlements of a few dozen people. That is most of the inhabited world, and it is not all of it — GeoNames records an unknown population as zero, and those 4.7 million entries are excluded because they are mostly farmsteads and duplicates rather than towns. So a settlement with no recorded population will not appear unless it is an administrative seat. Coverage is also denser in well-surveyed countries than in sparsely mapped ones. Names are shown in their local form; search also accepts the plain-Latin spelling. Suburbs are distinguished from towns and only labelled once you are close enough for them to mean something, so a city's districts do not crowd out real settlements around it.

Global day colour uses a locally prepared NASA Earth Observatory Blue Marble: Next Generation December 2004 base map. Regional views load bundled detail prepared from the native 500-metre imagery; these are dated surface observations, not current weather or street-level photography. Optional Esri imagery, recent NASA VIIRS cloud imagery and the temperature and active-fire layers use the internet only when selected. Terrain geometry uses a bundled 4K NOAA ETOPO1 land-elevation derivative: pointer metres are approximate global context, while the 4× and 8× modes are explicitly exaggerated study views. Open star clusters are drawn as their real member stars — the Pleiades, Beehive, M6, M7 and the Double Cluster, from Gaia memberships published by Cantat-Gaudin & Anders (2020) via CDS. Observed star map uses NASA/Goddard's map of measured stellar positions, brightness and colour, chiefly from Gaia DR2. Sky sights adds six real optical telescope composites: Orion, Carina, Triangulum, Andromeda, the Small Magellanic Cloud and Tarantula. Source credits accompany each view. These images use processed exposure, with a soft edge fade, and have finite detail; they are not a live or naked-eye view. The wide star map gives way to telescope imagery at close magnification. Other catalogue entries supply positions and sizes without invented photographic detail. The Hyades needs no help — its bright members are the V of Taurus and are already in the starfield. NASA cloud imagery is a composite of several consecutive days, not one. VIIRS flies a polar orbit, so a single day of daylight imagery is a set of north-south swaths that do not quite meet near the equator — the gaps are real, and the ground track shifts between days, so yesterday saw what today missed. Each pixel is taken from the most recent day that actually observed it, cross-faded where two dates meet. Anything still uncovered is interpolated from the surrounding observed pixels, and the panel says how much. It is recent weather, not live, and the dates are shown. Terrain shadows come from a horizon map precomputed from ETOPO1: for every point, the highest angle the land reaches in eight directions. The Sun is removed where that horizon is above it, and enclosed ground receives proportionally less skylight. It is a continental-scale effect by construction and the bundled model is kilometres per sample. Close in, with High-detail imagery on, the streamed elevation adds local relief at about 38 m. Sea colour follows real depth: ETOPO1 bathymetry drives Beer-Lambert absorption, which is why shelves and lagoons differ from open ocean for a physical reason rather than a painted fringe, with only a restrained bottom return in genuinely shallow water because the substrate is not known everywhere. Moonlight is phase- and direction-correct and deliberately faint; the aurora is a fixed geomagnetic model and is labelled as one. Clock times estimate civil time for the place you are looking at, not solar time: the IANA timezone comes from the nearest of 516,558 GeoNames places. Your browser’s tz database supplies offsets and daylight-saving rules; timezone boundaries and sparse place coverage can affect the estimate. Beside it, dimmed, is apparent solar time — where the Sun actually is, which is what the terminator and the shadows are drawn from, and which over Toronto in September differs from the clock by an hour and seventeen minutes. Out at sea, where no jurisdiction has an opinion, the reading is ship’s time: fifteen-degree zones from Greenwich, and it says so. The starfield is shaped from a bundled NASA HEASARC catalog subset; the Sun uses NASA SDO/HMI imagery; Moon, planet and solar positions are lightweight visual approximations. Cloud imagery is a recent satellite layer, not live weather. The temperature layers are recent daily satellite products, not a live thermometer: Ocean is a sea-surface analysis, and Land is the temperature of the ground itself rather than the air above it, with gaps where cloud blocked the view. Fire markers are heat detections at satellite overpass and include flares and agricultural burning, not only wildfire. Surface colour, relief, water depth and lighting are interpretive visual treatments, not measurements or scientific simulation. Selected-body Images and Search buttons open Google only when clicked.

Explore the sources: Natural Earth · NASA Blue Marble · NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. · ESO telescope imagery · ESA/Hubble telescope imagery

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