About this site

Welcome to my website. If you were wondering what all the "theme" nonsense is, or why your browser asked you to share your location, it's because I discovered Cosine Kitty's Astronomy Engine and had to do something with it. The engine does a huge amount, but I'm using it to get a position for the sun and moon and put them on your screen.

If you're visiting the site in "Sky mode" you'll hopefully see a sun or a moon or both on the page (you might also be be visiting when they've both set, in which case sorry about that — please come back later). The site will be dark when the sun is set and light when the sun has risen. The sun and moon are mapped fairly crudely onto the screen using Azimuth and Altitude values from the astronomy engine. I map altitude to the vertical direction of the screen (the sun sets at the bottom of the screen, whereas the top of the screen is reserved for when the sun is directly overhead). The azimuth is a little stranger to map because it's a 360 degree value which I'm mapping on a horizontal plane, so I decided to map the horizontal screen as West to East — for this reason a sun with an azimuth of 85 degrees would appear in the same place as a sun at the same altitude with an azimuth of 105 degrees.

I also use moon phase calculations from the Astronomy Engine to draw the moon in the correct phase so it should map pretty closely to what you see in the sky.

Of course if that is all annoying you can use the "Site Options" button at the top of the screen to select "Day theme" or "Night theme" instead. In that case you won't see any celestial objects on screen. I'll save your choice on your device so shouldn't need to be changing themes often (unless you want to).