The orbital sun, measured

North is up. Each globe is centred on the midpoint between the photograph and the point where the sun is overhead, so the pin and the sun sit on opposite sides of the disc at equal distances and the gap between them is the sun's elevation. The day/night line is drawn where it really is and always runs between them — at golden hour it passes through the pin, by day it lies beyond it, at night the pin is behind it. The light comes from the CORNER of the frame nearest the sun's bearing, at an intensity that follows the elevation: morning frames glow from the bottom right, evening frames from the bottom left, and a frame made after sunset does not glow at all from the sun. At night the MOON takes the corners if it is up and lit — silver, from the corner nearest the point where the moon is overhead, which can be a top corner — and is drawn in that corner at its phase; a night with the moon down lights nothing (SPEC §7g3). Never a top corner for the sun — north is up and the sun is south of every photograph here.

SPEC §7g2: the line drawn is the GEOMETRIC terminator, and the criterion is stated on geometric elevation. Apparent elevation (what the readout and the certificate print) includes refraction, and that term alone reaches 0.3889° — so 1 of 7 photographs could never satisfy a 0.1° criterion written against it. The two columns below are the evidence.

Coastline: 4901 vertices from tiles/world-z5.pmtiles at zoom 0, simplified to 0.143206° — the same archive the big globe on /map is drawn from, so the two cannot disagree about a coastline.

Live — the globe follows the scrubber

Drag the dial. The globe turns to the new instant rather than cutting to it, and the terminator sweeps across the pin at the moment the light changes. Under prefers-reduced-motion the same change is a cut, and nothing animates on load either way.

Sun over the photograph

night       az332.48°el-36.20°moonaz122.96°el+34.96°

The sun is -36.20° above the horizon at bearing 332.48° from Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square. The moon is 96% lit, waning gibbous, +34.96° above the horizon at bearing 122.96°, 31.5′ across.

The moon's phase, drawn

The same two-arc construction the globe box uses (render.ts moonLitPath: lit area = k exactly, measured off the path in render.test.ts), at synthetic illuminated fractions, with the bright limb to the right. Two of the three night photographs on the site are 96% and 98% lit, so their dark sliver is one or two pixels wide at the size the page draws; the shape is the truth of a near-full moon. The third is a 13% crescent with the moon below the pin's horizon — drawn since 2026-09-12, dimmed, on its own tile above.

at the size /photo/[id] draws it

  •   5%
  •  13%
  •  25%
  •  50%
  •  75%
  •  90%
  •  96%
  •  99%
  • 100%

magnified

  •   5%
  •  13%
  •  25%
  •  50%
  •  75%
  •  90%
  •  96%
  •  99%
  • 100%