Easy tool to find your sun angles

very cool. surprisingly useful for me. Thanks

Very nice, thanks for posting.
Especially like the visual representation.

Thanks for posting that Matt !

Very handy for locating trees around structures (or woods).
Regulating the sun around fruit/nut trees until last frost danger is past can save you from a lot of fruitless years.

If you guys are hot for solumis try sun calc. http://suncalc.net
There all build off working with google maps, the main difference with sun calc is you can scrub the position of the sun back and ford to any time of day.
I absolutely could not understand how the "vertical sun" of the lower tropics works in relation to planting orientation for tall and skinny or fat n short plants.
It wasn't until i watched the sun going across the sky back and forth many times before I could clearly see it's behavior as a light source.

Superb, I think a combination of both is great.
I agree the "bigger lines higher in the sky" is strange, but hey it's free.
It seems what Suncalc is missing what I liked in Solummis. Specifically, the angles of sun above the horizon, but maybe I just can't find that.
Azimuth angles might be handy for on the ground work too.
Both websites could do well to orient the map towards the sun -- this is certainly not a complaint -- I think they are both great sites.
Thanks for another great tool!! I love the smart people who can make these things.
Saybian, I also agree that these are good tools to combine with observation -- nice tools for planning however.

sun seeker app for ipad is amazing. well worth the 10 or so dollars. find sun angles for any date of year and hour of day for any place on earth. for example, i wanted to know if some trees would block the sun during winter so i could decide where to build my house. i just input the dates, pointed my ipad at the trees, and saw where the sun would be in the sky during those dates (they have a little yellow sun and its path superimposed on the view through the camera). imho, cant get any better than that. also used it for hugelbed placement, and am even using it to decide where to park when im down in south texas to avoid the blazing sun as much as possible.

Wow -- I may have to start saving up some $'s for that.

For anybody with a smartphone, Google Sky and SkEye are also great if you're at your site and need to physically see the sun's orientation at a specific time of the year/month/day. You can just set the day and tilt your phone till you find the sun's position relative to your GPS coordinates.

Here's a related tidbit that requires nothing but awareness and observation. The full moon follows the same track across the sky as the sun does 6 months earlier or later. So, if it's near midwinter and you want to determine where the sunlight and shadows fall at midsummer, just go out on full moon night and observe moonlight and shadow. Or vice versa.

I keep getting asked what the best tools are to do this.. so i wrote a blog post. I think I got everything, but I'd appreciate it if you could point out any I missed.

http://www.milkwood.net/2015/06/01/design-basics-mapping-the-sun-on-your-site/


Cheers
Nick

I just drew up a front gallery/porch addition to the house. This works great: Sustainable By Design Except that it made obvious what I was afraid of; more compromise between enough shade in the summer and sun in the winter. Can't have it all both ways. C'est la vie.

Excellent.. thanks Eric... I hadn't seen that collection before... I'l add a link to it

Nick Ritar wrote:I keep getting asked what the best tools are to do this.. so i wrote a blog post. I think I got everything, but I'd appreciate it if you could point out any I missed.

http://www.milkwood.net/2015/06/01/design-basics-mapping-the-sun-on-your-site/


Cheers
Nick

Nick, I bought Sun Surveyor when I was aspiring to learn photography, and it's a slick app. I'll have to pull it out and use it more now that a lot of the diseased pines in our yard have come down. I'm glad to see Sun Surveyor was one of your two favorite apps. That Solar Pathfinder looks really cool. That looks like the kind of tool folks might pool their money to buy and share.

The angle of the dangle is directly proportional to the motion of the ocean -Pythagoras.

Referring, I presume, to mechanics that may be heavenly but not necessarily celestial?

Back OT: there are excellent sun calculators designed for solar power (photovoltaic) applications. But of course they work fine for gardens also, since plants are solar powered.

One example:
https://www.sunearthtools.com/dp/tools/pos_sun.php

... I only used paper and pen ... and a lot of patience.
Patience is needed to watch the sun and shade patterns in different times (hours and months). Paper and pen to draw the shade patterns on a map of the garden or other space for which I wanted to know the 'sun angles'. I.m.o. it's a fun thing to do.