Module 04

Where it is your moment

PLATE № 04 — CLOCK LINE
EQUIRECTANGULAR · TRUE TIME ZONES
EPOCH · —

Date of birth

Time you were born

Only the time on the clock matters here, not the date. Somewhere on Earth a clock is reading it right now, and that place keeps moving west.

Country outlines · Natural Earth2,000 largest cities plotted

The line is where mean solar time reads your birth time — it slides west without stopping, a quarter of a degree every minute. Clocks do not: they jump an hour at a time, and a zone's boundaries follow borders rather than meridians. So the cities are picked out by what their clocks actually say, within 30 minutes either side, and the two do not line up exactly. That gap is the difference between the Sun and a government.

The line is at

—

degrees of longitude — east of Greenwich when positive — sliding west a quarter of a degree every minute

People inside your moment

—

living in cities whose clocks read within half an hour of it

Cities in your moment · —

Working out which clocks agree…

Time zones and daylight saving come from the browser's own zone database, asked zone by zone, rather than from longitude divided by fifteen.

Population counts only places of 15,000 people or more, so the real figure is higher. Cities: GeoNames, CC BY 4.0. Outlines: Natural Earth, public domain.