World Sunlight Map

Watch the sun rise and set all over the world on this real-time, computer-generated illustration of the earth's patterns of sunlight and darkness. The clouds are updated daily with current weather satellite imagery.

The Peters projection is one way of looking at the spherical earth as a flat map. Useful for political maps, it shows the true area of land masses, choosing instead to distort their shape. Compare this with Mollweide, Mercator, or equirectangular projection maps.

Also available is a semi-realistic view of dawn and dusk from far above the Earth, a look at the moon, and information about how this works.