Sunlight in the U.S.

This web map shows what time the sun set on December 21, 2021 in the 1,000 largest cities in the U.S.

Why it exists

The web map was created for the workshop Build a Web Map (with open-source software) offered through UMass Amherst Libraries in March 2022. I was looking for a timely dataset to use in a demonstration and, since Daylight Savings Time is (at the time of this writing) up for debate in Congress, I figured, "Why not make a map showing how much darkness Standard Time forces us to endure each winter?" Hence this map.

Where the data came from

City point locations are courtesy the SimpleMaps US Cities Database.

Sunrise, sunset, and hours of daylight were retrieved from Sunrise-Sunset.org via their API. The Python script I wrote to query the API and format the data can be found in the UMass GIS workshop repository.