Night shading

Map → Night shading shades the side of the Earth in darkness, at the end of the dashboard's time range or at its start. Show the sun adds the point on Earth the sun stands over.

It needs no query. The panel works out the sun's position for that moment and draws the night as a polygon of its own, a dataset called Night (and Sun), which moves when the time range does — with the dashboard's auto-refresh, the terminator creeps west as you watch.

The sun's position comes from NOAA's general solar position formulas, good to about a quarter of a degree. The night reaches to Web Mercator's limit, short of the pole, and repeats for every copy of the world a zoomed-out map shows side by side.

Its colour and opacity are the Night layer's, in kepler's side panel; save the map to keep them. The Night dataset has no time column, so a time filter on the map never hides it.

A Geomap Night / Day layer becomes this option when the panel is switched; see Coming from Geomap.