There a street in Manhattan that, during a certain time of year the light shines all the way down the grid of buildings. Here's the link to that moment
This is great. I would love a way to simulate something like possible tree placement and how much shade that may generate over the years. There are some parts of my area that are, despite being cut out of a forest, devoid of trees but are supposed to be "outdoor shared spaces".
Full sun all day at a dog park in August, for example, just isn't a place I want to be.
tppiotrowski 12 hours ago [-]
Site maintainer here. There is a polygon drawing tool in the upper right corner of the map. You can use it to draw polygons on the map and assign them a height. The shadows will update instantly. You can use it to add buildings that are missing from the map, simulate a tree placement or even simulate cutting down a tree if you set the height to 0.
illithid0 11 hours ago [-]
Wow! Can't believe I missed this. Thank you.
7 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
km3r 7 hours ago [-]
My friends and I used this for a camping party's solar panel's placement (for charging a battery). A large campsite with intermixed trees makes it hard to find the optimal spot on our own, but this map helped us keep the party going late into the night before we needed to turn on the generator.
tppiotrowski 5 hours ago [-]
Nice. I'm really proud of how fast the annual sunlight calculation is for a location but it def needs better UX.
procflora 6 hours ago [-]
I've seen and loved this before but only today I thought to zoom all the way out and see the true terminator affected by elevation. We usually only seen the idealized smooth curve. Very neat!
tonym128 5 hours ago [-]
This is so awesome, really really well done on the UI and UX.
I don’t know if the building data is from OSM but some of the buildings in my area are not high enough at all and therefore only make a really small shadow. It’s off by a factor of 3 or so.
nullhole 60 minutes ago [-]
Factor of 3 sounds like a feet-metres unit error
tppiotrowski 4 hours ago [-]
Building data comes from OvertureMaps data which is a superset of OSM. I update the building data set each month so if you make changes in OSM they should show up on ShadeMap at latest 30 days later.
foco_tubi 13 hours ago [-]
This doesn't look particularly accurate, at least not relative to what I can see right now out my window.
tppiotrowski 12 hours ago [-]
Website creator/maintainer here. Happy to try and diagnose the error if you elaborate on what the discrepancy is (tree, building, hill, etc)...
Gallows4574 12 hours ago [-]
Very cool tool! It's generally accurate, but, there are spots showing shadows where there are no trees or anything at all to cast a shadow, and missing several spots where there are actually trees.
It's missing a 40' tall ash, a 40' tall maple, and all four 30' tall blue spruce. So they're not exactly small trees. Our septic field is showing as in shadow all day even though there are no trees near it. That shadow doesn't move at all like the rest so I'm not sure what it's detecting.
tppiotrowski 11 hours ago [-]
Sorry about that. The current tree estimate is done via computer vision but I am working on migrating to LiDAR backed data which should eliminate false positives.
Just waiting for the TBs and TBs of data to download and then this Macbook M4 is going to make some heat...
foco_tubi 12 hours ago [-]
Hi there! My office window faces east and this morning, your map showed shade from the building across the street (correct), as well as shade from my building on the lawn below my window (incorrect).
tppiotrowski 12 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the reply. Do you have a tree or bush outside your window? I estimate where tree shadows fall but it's not super accurate. In the settings dialog you can toggle, "below canopy", "above canopy" or disable tree shadows altogether.
fxwin 9 hours ago [-]
I've seen the setting, and I've seen that you suggest toggling it when tree shadows seem inaccurate, can you elaborate on what that setting does exactly?
tppiotrowski 9 hours ago [-]
"Top of canopy" - view from above like looking down from an airplane window. You won't see any shadows looking down on a forest because you only see sunlight landing on the top of the canopy. Most accurate.
"Below canopy" - what shadows would look like on the ground. If you're in a dense forest everything is in shadow because the trees obscure the sun. I guesstimate how big and where the below canopy shadows land. Any vegetation that's more than 2 meters tall, I place a shaded area beneath it. Not super accurate because it treats trees like cylinders instead of a sphere/triangle on top of a cylinder.
"No trees" - only building and terrain shadows are shown on the map.
9 hours ago [-]
foco_tubi 8 hours ago [-]
Toggling to no canopy fixes it - palm trees cast little to no shade
mplanchard 8 hours ago [-]
Ha! A friend and I had this idea ages ago when living in Austin. I actually have the domain “walkdarkly.com” registered for it, in case I ever got around to it. If somebody actually doing something with it wants the domain, I’m happy to talk about transferring it
it exists since many years with this French website
cadamsdotcom 6 hours ago [-]
Had a quick go of it on mobile.
That version has major UX issues unfortunately.
jborichevskiy 11 hours ago [-]
I've wanted something like this - in Boulder the foothills cast a shadow on the town considerably earlier than sunset provided by weather apps. So in theory, this should be possible to figure out when a park will actually see a sunset. Nice work!
stilldavid 9 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite apps is PeakFinder, it shows local topography in an AR style UI. It also shows where and when the sun will set given the mountains around you! Well worth the few bucks.
dewey 8 hours ago [-]
Agreed! It's one of these apps (Similar to Flightradar) that just feel like a great use of technology and add a little bit of joy.
jborichevskiy 6 hours ago [-]
Definitely one of my favorites too! In my experience though it's best used at the location you're expecting the sunset, tricky to see when a specific point elsewhere will have their sunset (it may have changed though, I should check this)
andybak 6 hours ago [-]
According to this my garden is almost entirely in the shade but I have a suntan to disprove it.
Very nice! I’ve built something similar for Berlin[1] which is based on a digital surface model to also accurately cast shadows from trees, hills and bushes.
This is interesting. Have you used it to find a nice place to have a drink?
waterpowder 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, although those days I tend to prefer places in the shade, or inside with AC...
pavon 13 hours ago [-]
Be sure to check out the different layers. In addition to the default which shows shade at a given moment, there are also options for hours of sun in given day, and an a UI to quickly show shade at any day/time of year.
culebron21 11 hours ago [-]
I see only a grey rectangle and a hand cursor.
tppiotrowski 10 hours ago [-]
The map likely geolocated you somewhere without buildings (or maybe in the ocean) and where it is the middle of the night (so everything is in shadow).
Try this link which shows the shadows at the Space Needle in Seattle WA today at 5pm:
Not specifically for eclipses but has been useful in finding places where the sun will be visible during the current eclipse since the eclipse will occur when the sun is quite low on the horizon.
beezlewax 7 hours ago [-]
I used this to check if I could see today's eclipse in Barcelona from my apartment buildings roof. Worked pretty well.
utopcell 7 hours ago [-]
It doesn't. I went to Saragoza in Spain, at 8:30pm on August 12 to verify. Cool project nonetheless.
There a street in Manhattan that, during a certain time of year the light shines all the way down the grid of buildings. Here's the link to that moment
https://shademap.app/@40.7426,-73.9841,13.48594z,17839875468...
Full sun all day at a dog park in August, for example, just isn't a place I want to be.
I love the game like pixel perfect shadow maps.
I made a similar site last year - https://tonym128.github.io/peakylight/peakylight.html and used ray casting
It's missing a 40' tall ash, a 40' tall maple, and all four 30' tall blue spruce. So they're not exactly small trees. Our septic field is showing as in shadow all day even though there are no trees near it. That shadow doesn't move at all like the rest so I'm not sure what it's detecting.
Just waiting for the TBs and TBs of data to download and then this Macbook M4 is going to make some heat...
"Below canopy" - what shadows would look like on the ground. If you're in a dense forest everything is in shadow because the trees obscure the sun. I guesstimate how big and where the below canopy shadows land. Any vegetation that's more than 2 meters tall, I place a shaded area beneath it. Not super accurate because it treats trees like cylinders instead of a sphere/triangle on top of a cylinder.
"No trees" - only building and terrain shadows are shown on the map.
it exists since many years with this French website
That version has major UX issues unfortunately.
[1]: https://sunsit.io/
Try this link which shows the shadows at the Space Needle in Seattle WA today at 5pm:
https://shademap.app/@47.61991,-122.34913,15.43536z,17865792...
Or look at the shadows of the Alps at sunrise:
https://shademap.app/@45.46158,6.45036,7.47555z,178633748245...
Has has existed for many years