Shade Map | Hacker News Reader

Shade Map

shademap.app

248 pointsfredley61 comments

This tool uses OpenStreetMap data for the buildings and base layer.

Unfortunately, it kind of hides that it is doing that, which sucks. Usually the required attribution is placed in a corner of the map. Shade Map has a little information-i there which does appear to list OpenStreetMap according to my browser's dev-tools, but it seems to be broken and gets hidden behind other page elements, so only '© Shade Map |' is visible.

@tppiotrowzki commenting everywhere but not here ;-/

Possibly didn't have the time to comment on this yet. Last comment is from 10h ago

You throwing shade?

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.

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.

Wow! Can't believe I missed this. Thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge

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...

Shameless plug: been working on https://www.streethenge.com for sometime. You type in a street and it shows whether the sun ever aligns with it at sunrise or sunset, and when (date, time, compass bearing). Works with the moon as well.

Here's the page for Manhattanhenge: https://www.streethenge.com/henge/new-york

It works for any street, and there's an add to calendar button for the next alignment. One warning: street lookups go through public OSM APIs, so the occasional query can time out due to api limits. I haven't figured out what to do about that yet without exponentially increasing the size of the app.

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.

Nice. I'm really proud of how fast the annual sunlight calculation is for a location but it def needs better UX.

And I for placing a permanent solar array - I live in a deep, steep valley with a broad range of topography, and it helped me find an optimal spot for year-round balance of shade.

This doesn't look particularly accurate, at least not relative to what I can see right now out my window.

Website creator/maintainer here. Happy to try and diagnose the error if you elaborate on what the discrepancy is (tree, building, hill, etc)...

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).

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.

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?

"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.

Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but what's the difference between "top of canopy" and "No trees" then?

Toggling to no canopy fixes it - palm trees cast little to no shade

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.

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...

Have you written up how you built it? I'd be curious.

Would just like to say thank you so much for this tool! Ended up finding a quieter park to watch the eclipse last night.

Hi! I've recently made a shade calculator specifically for climbs in North wales:

https://connies.club/shade/12083/holyhead-mountain

It's important for me to use accurate height-maps as (obviously) the terrain is very three dimensional.

Are you using the public LiDAR data as well?

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!

This is so awesome, really really well done on the UI and UX.

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

The cloud effect is really nice!

It reminds me of this nice website for when you want to have a drink in the sun at a terrasse in Paris :D https://jveuxdusoleil.fr/#16/48.8551/2.3479

This is interesting. Have you used it to find a nice place to have a drink?

Yes, although those days I tend to prefer places in the shade, or inside with AC...

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.

[1]: https://sunsit.io/

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

This hints at a hiking trip planner maybe? Depending on time of day and year evaluate a path to be in the direct sun/shade?

In summer, I might want to avoid the direct sun. Suggest the hiking path with least direct sunshine. And if it is autumn already, then please suggest a hiking path to be in the sun all day.

Might be a cool feature to compare hiking paths by percentage of direct sunshine.

But maybe, selecting a path through a forest vs. across open fields might already do.

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!

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.

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.

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)

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.

Curious how it knows my location despite Safari not prompting and no location services indicator in my menu bar. (Mac, not iOS).

I'm not suggesting anything nefarious but it is odd.

Nice app/service though well done.

Based on the location I got it guesses the location from the IP. The accuracy of that varies wildly by country and ISP. The US is a place where it is usually accurate to the city level

Aha thanks. I'm using a different computer and I mistakenly thought I had Private Relay switched on; it's not enabled on this machine. Turning it on gives expected results. Needed the IP reminder to figure that out!

https://jveuxdusoleil.fr/#16/48.8551/2.3479

it exists since many years with this French website

Had a quick go of it on mobile.

That version has major UX issues unfortunately.

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.

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.

Factor of 3 sounds like a feet-metres unit error

FYI things too far out of the current viewport don't cast shadows, can be annoying for mountains/hills are sun down/set if you're not aware of it.

Love this as a simulation tool, not just a map. I’d want to ask: “If I plant trees here, which public spaces get shade at 4pm in July?”

https://app.shadowmap.org

Has has existed for many years

According to this my garden is almost entirely in the shade but I have a suntan to disprove it.

Does this handle eclipses

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.

I used this to check if I could see today's eclipse in Barcelona from my apartment buildings roof. Worked pretty well.

It doesn't. I went to Saragoza in Spain, at 8:30pm on August 12 to verify. Cool project nonetheless.

I see only a grey rectangle and a hand cursor.

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:

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...

Apparently the server was overloaded, and I didn't see my area. Now it works. https://shademap.app/@43.22319,76.93616,12.00576z,1786337482...

Trees should not cast shadows as if their foliage extends all the way to the ground.

Agreed. From current data it's not possible to know the type of tree, only their locations so the model is simplified.

This is very cool

Reply on news.ycombinator.com