sandbox  /  exhibit 0004

Sky, computed

Where the sun and the moon are, for any place and any day, worked out from the date and nothing else. The page fetches nothing — it cannot — so it will give the same answers on a plane, in fifty years.

The altitude of the sun and the moon through one local solar day, drawn as a polar curve: the angle is the hour, the radius is how high the body stands. Outside the dashed circle it is above the horizon.
day civil nautical astronomical night

The sun

The moon

Whether to believe it

A clock like this is a claim, and the claim is checkable. Below, it recomputes twenty positions that somebody else published together with the answers, and then recovers five constants of the solar system that appear nowhere in it — out of its own arithmetic, in your browser, with nothing fetched.