The U.S. Mapped in Shadows of the Setting Sun

As many Americans shivering their molars out can probably recall, the Summer Solstice is a bittersweet time, marking the gradual but inevitable turn toward cold and darkness. If it was in our power to stop time right before the Solstice ended, locking the country in an eternal warm evening, what might it look like?

Robbi Bishop-Taylor has provided a kind of answer in this unique, lovely map of the contiguous U.S. cast in sunset shadows on the Solstice (aka June 20). Bishop-Taylor, a geospatial-science PhD candidate at Australia’s University of New South Wales, used NASA data and a hill-shading algorithm to simulate sunset at a “consistent azimuth of 300 degrees from north and an altitude of 1.5 degrees above the horizon,” he says via Reddit DM. The map “effectively shows what the shadows would be like at each point in the map if the sun was 1.5 degrees above the horizon at that specific place!”