WorldEye
The Earth as the Sun is lighting it, right now, and a handful of instruments for asking the map questions it can actually answer.
Made by Matteo D’Avena
Version 0.5.1 · built 2026-08-15
The page is free to use and always will be. Its code is not open source — © 2026, all rights reserved. The data is a separate matter: it is not the author’s to license, and keeps its own terms, listed beside each source below.
What it is
WorldEye draws the Earth as the Sun is lighting it at this moment: the real day–night terminator, the twilight bands, city lights at night and moonlight, and the Moon’s shadow during an eclipse. The clock can be steered, so any instant between 1900 and 2100 can be put on the map and linked to.
Fifteen instruments answer questions about a point you aim at — the Sun’s angle and the energy it delivers, the length of the day, the time zone and its clock, the country, the magnetic declination, the plate under your feet, the height of the ground and the summits near it, the antipode, and how long seismic waves or a tsunami would take to arrive. Layers draw the graticule, borders, magnetic declination, plate boundaries, antipodal land, climate zones and the track of an eclipse.
Everything is computed in your browser from the public data listed below. There is no server, no API and no tracking.
What moment this is
The surfaces of this map do not all live in the same year, and never did. The astronomy is calculated for whatever instant the clock is showing — the map itself states that instant, and this page cannot, because it is written once and served to everyone. The rest are fixed:
- City lights
- 2016
- Ground and sea floor
- ETOPO1, 2009
- Climate normals
- 1991–2020
- Time zone shapes
- timezone-boundary-builder 2026c
- Time zone rules
- the reading browser’s own tz database
- Magnetic field
- IGRF-14 — fitted at five-year epochs to 2025, its own forecast to 2030, and nothing outside that
- Plate boundaries
- PB2002, Bird 2003
- Political boundaries
- Natural Earth 1:50m, de facto lines, undated at source
The Earth itself
- Daylight imagery, month by month
- NASA Blue Marble Next Generationpublic domain
- City lights at night
- NASA Black Marble 2016public domain
- The Moon in the corner
- Galileo, PIA00405 (NASA/JPL)public domain
- Height of the ground, depth of the sea
- ETOPO1 Ice Surface — Amante & Eakins 2009, NOAA NCEIpublic domain
Places and names
- Named summits
- Wikidata, checked against Natural EarthCC0 and public domain
- Cities
- GeoNamesCC BY 4.0
- Country outlines, names and flags
- Natural Earth 1:50m; flag artwork from flagcdnpublic domain
- Time zone boundaries
- timezone-boundary-builder 2026cODbL — and so is the derived file served here
How the Earth works
- Climate zones and the monthly normals behind them
- Beck et al. 2023, Köppen–Geiger 1991–2020CC BY 4.0
- The magnetic field, 1900 to 2030
- IGRF-14, IAGA Working Group V-MODMIT / CC BY 4.0
- Plate boundaries, with their type and speed
- PB2002 — Bird, 2003academic use, cited
- Seismic wave speeds through the whole Earth
- ak135 — Kennett, Engdahl & Buland, 1995 (via ObsPy)academic use, cited
- Sun, Moon, eclipses
- Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms; NOAA solar equationschecked against JPL Horizons and the eclipse canon
What this map does not know
These are Natural Earth’s de facto lines. Every border dataset takes a position somewhere — Kashmir, Crimea, Western Sahara, Cyprus — and none of them is neutral. Saying which one is the least that can be done.
Each cell of the elevation grid is the mean over about 22 km, so Mont Blanc’s cell holds 2,360 m against 4,808 real. Named summits are a separate, surveyed list, shown beside the average rather than folded into it — the gap between the two is the honest picture.
The energy figures are clear sky at sea level. Real weather only ever takes away from them.
IGRF is the regular internal field. It knows nothing about the rocks under your feet, which are worth whole degrees locally, and nothing about magnetic storms.
They come from a source you chose, not from an event, and they say nothing about how big the wave would be — which is the part that decides whether a coast is in trouble.
Every number on this page is computed in your browser from the data above. There is no server, no API, no telemetry, and nothing about you leaves the page.