Interactive 3D Globe

The globe finds the subsolar point, the place where the Sun is directly overhead, from the Sun’s position in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms and the Earth’s rotation. Every place 90° from that point is on the terminator. Sunrise and sunset are defined for the Sun’s upper edge touching the horizon, with the Sun’s centre 0.833° below it because of refraction, so the gold line is drawn there. The shading then darkens through the three twilights to full night once the Sun is 18° below the horizon.

The terminator is a great circle around the Earth, but because the Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23.4°, it only runs from pole to pole near the March and September equinoxes. In June the North Pole stays in daylight and the South Pole in darkness, and in December it is the other way round, so the line appears tilted and curved on the globe.

The country outlines, names and capitals come from Natural Earth’s 1:110 million scale data, which is in the public domain. Natural Earth shows borders as they are controlled on the ground, and marks some areas such as Western Sahara, Somaliland and Northern Cyprus separately; this does not imply any view on disputed territory. At this scale small island nations are not drawn, but you can still find their cities with the search.

The time shown is the time in the capital, with its offset from UTC and daylight saving time applied by your browser’s time zone database. When a country’s major cities use more than one offset, such as the United States, Russia, Brazil or Australia, the card also lists how many offsets they use and the range, so you know other regions will differ.

Yes. The globe is normally drawn with WebGL, which uses your graphics chip. If WebGL is unavailable or switched off, it falls back to a simpler Canvas renderer that draws the same map, borders and day and night shading pixel by pixel, a little less sharply. If you have reduced motion turned on, the globe stops at once when you let go and moves to places without the flying animation.