I created a circular calendar to show the sunrise and sunset times (as well as the times of the three types of twilight and solar noon) and visualise it in a circle. This one is for New York City.
Inspired by things like this and having always visualised the year as a circle I combined them and personalised it for my location.
I used Python and the Astral package to calculate the sun and moon times.
Having made one for myself, loads of people who saw it suggested I sell it, so I set up a website where you can order a printed custom one of your own: https://sunlightcalendar.com/

Somewhere a long way south.

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Well this is New York City, so depends on your definition really

Yes about the same as Madrid in Southern Europe.

Interesying. What is the program used to create this? And maybe this kind of graphic needs to set fixed equal area for each hour ring.

That's a lot of winter sunlight and extremely dark for summer time, compared to my reality. Nice graph though :)

My comment isn't showing yet, but I used Python and the Astral package to calculate the sun and moon times, and then it's basically a (complicated) dot to dot between those times.

I was inspired by things like this visualisation which is equal area, but having always visualised the year as a circle I wanted to combine the two.

Would also like to know what was used to create this. Would like to make one for where I live. Different long/lat and summer time hour adjustment.

Ok, but where? Usa? China? Uk? etc...

Comment said NYC

For what year is this? It shows a full moon for December 25, but in 2022 the full moon happens on December 7.

Should have said, this is for next year (2023). With this year being nearly over it makes sense to start thinking about a calendar for next year.

After several of my friends saw mine they suggested I sell it, so I set up a website to do that and I'll make you one, wherever you are in the world https://sunlightcalendar.com/

Not sure where you are, but it does vary a lot, here is Edinburgh for example.

There are also more examples on my website.

Thanks! I'm in a place with summer midnight sun, and where it does not rise above the horizon at all for 25 days in winter. :D

Heh, I have lived a town that during the summer has only light and during the winter has only darkness. Today that town gets about 3 hours of sunlight. In a few weeks they will start a month long period of no sun at all.

It takes getting used to and if someone comes to experience it during either of the extremes they are visibly confused.

It's a true mindfuck, haha! I'm visiting relatives in northern Norway and it definitely messes with one's head a bit. Normally I live in the middle of Sweden where the changes are quite extreme too, sure, but nowhere near as drastic as above the polar circle

Can we please stop this time change nonsense?(

I lived in the Finnish Lapland for almost a year. :D

When you say ”mid-Sweden” is that aroung Umeå?

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Why are there those discreet drop? Daylight saving?

Cool. I lived in Barbados for a while where the longest day was about 25 minutes longer than the shortest.

One of my best friends is from Nairobi where Todd m you’d get pretty much a perfect circle (afaik)

Precisely, I think it would look much better without that.

Here's London without the jump (and changing the scale instead).

One of the options you can choose on my website is whether or not you want that jump to appear

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It really messes up visualisations like this, doesn't it?!

Here's London without the jump (and changing the scale instead).

One of the options you can choose on my website is whether or not you want that jump to appear.

The further south, the shorter the days in June/July.

This cannot be a long way south.

You are quite right. My eurocentrism was showing. Towards the equator would have been better :)

After a lifetime of city living I moved to the country this year where I can see the sunrise and sunset on the horizon... and the position and movement of the sun and moon day-to-day. It’s terribly interesting.

Nope. I love my time change.

Not quite perfect concentric circles, but a lot closer: https://imgur.com/a/DA3ehYR

This one is New York City, but I actually created a program to make them for anywhere in the world (and have posted a few examples in reply to other comments).

You can check out some examples for a few other places on my website.

The center looks like a Boo from Mario

I don’t like the small yellow part

Forgive my ignorance, but what is this type of chart called?

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Does it account for local daylight saving?

Not gonna lie, this looks like a great contrast range target

I don't know that there's a specific name for it. A linear one might be called a sun graph, but I see this more as a type of calendar.

It so much fun waking up being like oh yay, it's still dark I can sleep more but then being 5 hours late to work. The daylight changes too fast

Yes, and actually you can choose to show it like this or to have the scale change instead (after all the sun doesn't really change, it's just our clocks).

See the images on the design page of my website to see what I mean.

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So pick a location on your website and get its graph as it is location specific?

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Super rad! That is beautiful

Eastern Standard Time is actually the Eastern Abnormal Time.

I’m surprised ads are allowed on this sub but the picture is pretty! If only we didn’t have daylight savings time or we’re on permanent DST.

Can you make one for Longyearbyen, Svalbard? Would be cool to see what it looks like deep in the Arctic circle.

your website is too hard to navigate to generate a graph, do i have to pay before I actually see the map. I'd not mind paying if I like and decide to get a highdef copy of pdf.
Seems like a subtle plugin for a business.

Why does it have two discontinuities in distribution?

I haven't got it set up to generate them on the website (yet), I make each one with a semi-manual process.

I feel there are enough examples on the website that you can get a good idea of what you're getting.

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So gravity pulls the sun down huh?

In short, Daylight Saving Time. It would look neater without it

So it’s basically website to purchase prints and not to create graphs for my desired locations

This is cool, just bought one. Nice job!

I wish the jump went the other way. I want daylight in the afternoon when I get home from work. I don’t mind getting to work/school in the dark.

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Exactly what i was wondering

It's so weird for me to look at this because I am basically used to nights being non-existent in June

You missed a rather important data point… where?

I have little idea what information you want to convey. No year, no location, no time zone, no hour indication.

So quick! As wonderful as it is unusable. Not only where, but when too (for Moon phases).

Interesting visualization. My only complhint would be that evening hours appear more impactfol than morning hours due to the larger circumference towards the outer edge.

That makes sense.
My assumption was this was done automatically. Either way you need to get paid if people like your work. But doing it manually makes more sense since you're investing more time to generate. I hoped that was more clearly mentioned in the webapp.

When I print them as posters I put a title at the top with the year and location. The time is then in local time and the hours are there if you zoom in

True, although there's a reasonable level of symmetry about noon

Can we make daylight savings permanent already? Who gives a shit about when the sun rises. I want more daylight in the afternoon

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Does the shape of the wobble change slightly over years/decades? Maybe some astrologists can support 🤔

Could you sell one of them already?

Correct. Now go give them money.

Wow, this is amazing. This is my favorite chart I’ve ever seen. Really nice work.

Yes but no.

Yes it changes in theory, but not enough to notice.

That said, I'm neither an astronomer nor an astrologist.

Looks like a radar/spider chart/plot.

Look back at when we tried it in the 70s. It turns out, most of us want sun in the morning. I mean, I agree with you it’s just interesting that we already tried.

It's a little late to be putting out calendars for this year.

Case in point that DST in the EST timezone is dumb

Missing is location. This is only going to work along one east to west line. Go north or south and it changes.

I put the location above it when I print posters. It also changes east to west, although the length of the day would be the same.

You can see daylight savings time in there. That should narrow it down.

I don't care which we choose. Just. Fucking. Pick. ONE. Personally I want later afternoons but I will accept either

True. But its also a great time of year for a retrospective.

This is really neat! I've been thinking for a while of creating a visualization like this to explain the consequences of having DST or not for different locations, but never got to it. You almost did all the work for me. The only thing I would personally do is emphasize the 8:00 and 18:00 lines (or something), so it becomes more clear how much daylight we sacrifice and/or gain outside working hours when keeping DST.

It only occurred to me with this graph that daylight saving time is not just half the year!

To be fair, in Belgium it's five months 'winter time' instead of four like the US.

The writing on the time axis is far too small, and uses the times “12am” and “12pm”, neither of which exist.

Edit to add: Beautiful data is not ambiguous. Midnight and noon are the unambiguous terms you are looking for. 12 noon is the meridiem and can be neither ante nor post itself. 12 midnight is both 12 hours post meridiem and 12 hours ante merdiem.

Of course, all that nonsense could be avoid if the 24-hour clock had been used for the scale instead.

Agreed, this needs a title to be meaningful.

Here try this website instead

Really goes to show how much the day “shortens” if you maintain your normal schedule after DST, thus lopping off the inside circle for Nov - Mar (assuming you get your day going between 7 and 9am and are not an early riser)

This seems to be about the worst possible way to show this.

It is virtually impossible to see the shape of the curve, and the size of the variation hard to see.

Why choose a circle? It distorts perception.

The area taken from 6 am to noon is nearly half the area from noon to 6 pm. What justifies this design choice from a data visualization perspective?

In the example of NYC op posted you can see dst happening where the graph has a sudden jog and it breaks the smoothness

Rather than a transition from black to white I'd like to see a line showing sunset at a variety of latitudes from the equater to the artic circle. Include the tropic. Maybe sunrise coukd be a different color.

A version in standard time year round would be interesting too.

My suggestion is to color it with the transition during sunset/dusk and sunrise/dawn.

Displayed like this, the Winter DST change looks dumber than ever.

Yeah is this allowed on the sub?

Damm, didn't thought about it😂

Is the inside or outside of the circle the start of the day (12:01am)

I was wondering why there is a sudden shift in the time there and shouldn't this close to a circle. And then I remember daylight saving time being a thing...

I’m not an expert on web design. But I have experience as a dumb website-user. It took a few reads and clicking around to understand how the whole process works. Maybe have the explanation for the concept in the first page instead of at the bottom of the product description? That’s like a restaurant only letting you know what kind of food they sell after you are already seated.The website itself is beautiful tough, so elegant🤩

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I find the visualization quite good. What is the location, and does that matter?

One thing that surprises a lot of people is that New York City (the example show by OP) is actually farther south than Rome, Italy. The majority of the US population lives south of New York City, and the majority of Europe lives north of Rome. To a lot of people in the US, New York City is considered pretty far north and would thus consider the winter months to not have much daylight compared to what they’re used to.

The location does matter. Farther toward the north pole, and you'd have a greater difference between maximum and minimum thicknesses of the sunlight band. At the equator, this would be nearly circular. And in the Southern Hemisphere, the pattern reverses, with longer days near year's end and shorter ones in the middle.

Both edges represent 00:00, with going forward through the day represented by going outward from the hub to the rim.

The winter change is Standard Time, an increasingly nonsensical name for a state we spend a third of the year in.

According to widespread convention, 12 PM is 12:00 (24h). Only the very instant of 12:00:00.0000... is the meridiem; the rest of the minute is post-. Similar applies to 12 AM / midnight / 00:00.

But I definitely agree that 24-hour time is the way to go and obviates this arbitrary half-day-division malarkey altogether.

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I refuse to acknowledge it being “standard.”

It's what our time zone would look like without arbitrary clock-changing fuckery introduced under false pretenses and maintained well past its usefulness under even falser ones.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've done this exact chart format before in D3 if you want one for your own location I'm happy to share the code!

It's a good idea, and I've done exactly that here

If anything, time should spring forward in November and fall back in March, so that there's more daylight at the end of winter days.

Yeah, I've noticed that! Stockholm in southern Sweden is mistakenly perceived as having similar conditions as NY while it's on the 59th northern parallell, meaning Alaska conditions. At this latitude the Sun is visible for 18 hours, 30 minutes during the summer solstice and 6 hours, 11 minutes during the winter solstice. Further up it gets much more extreme. :)

No. Haha it is not

>with going forward through the day represented by going outward from the hub to the rim.

That's what I was wondering

I figured the middle and rim would both be midnight since that's when a day cycles over and why I asked about 12:01 lol

I've seen the first sunrise after the polar night in Tromsø, it was pretty beautiful.

And one of the weirdest experience was in summer in Rovaniemi, it was already in after midsummer, so at midnight it was twilight, but we could still see where the sun at the horizon. It was in the north. Which is totally explainable but felt a bit off.

About 10 years ago I was hiking in the Finnish Lapland during the summer solstice and didn't really bother with the time since the only difference between the day and the night was that it was a bit colder during the night. I actually spent one entire night just hiking since it was nicer to hike with the lower temps.

But at one point I had a pair of Germans arrive at the same campsite where I was, at maybe 1 am in the morning, and they asked what time it was. They'd had trouble getting sleep because it was bright and I think were just amazed at the weirdness of the situation. My theory is that coming from somewhere south into all that could confuse you especially if you kinda rely on your "internal clock" that's tuned to the amount of light. But, if you live all through the transition from the darkest period of the winter all the way to the summer solstice, it actually doesn't seem that out of place.

Blackout curtains are one of those investments that you almost have to do if you cannot adjust to the constant sunlight. Some also purchase those light therapy lamps that artificially create a sense of sunrise in your bedroom. Haven't tried them myself, but I could see those working.

That's helpful, I'll take a look, thanks

There are gradations in there for the three different types of twilight

Ah, I see them now. Maybe look into making them more visible?

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