My neighbour has a map of the world on the wall. You can see it from the street in front of his house. It has a backlight but that only illuminates half of the map. The transition from day to night is shaped like a sine wave most of the time. It actually is a physical world sunlight map. Of course, you can simulate this with a computer too. There even is an instance using Google maps.

As many roads lead to Rome multiple ways are possible to this simulation. One could model the sun, earth, maybe more and start ray tracing. This approach would include solar eclipses but is quite heavy by means of the load on the processor. Because of the number of calculations involved in ray tracing is quite high. The way I choose to describe fully in this article is one close to it. Using vectors pointing from a sphere (earth) to a point (sun) I map a Mercator projected map of the world on the sphere. The challenges included are the yearly orbit of earth around the sun and it’s 23.5° tilted 24 hour spin. Read the rest of this entry »