Earth from the Sun's point of view
Every map of Earth you've ever seen is drawn from Earth's own point of view. This project creates a dynamic projection of Earth where north points to the north ecliptic pole.
Earth rendered as an actual lit sphere: the night side is shaded dark, and a small marker sits at the point on Earth's surface directly facing the Sun right now. Drag the globe to look around — it starts facing the sunlit side, and the camera always stays level with the plane the planets orbit in, so Earth's axial tilt reads as a lean rather than a bird's-eye view. The orbit diagram beside it shows where Earth currently sits on its yearly path around the Sun.
Earth shown the ordinary way, with Earth's own geographical north pole at the top — exactly like the maps you already know. Moving the hour slider spins the map in place so the meridian currently facing the Sun stays centered; the shaded night side and Sun marker track the real day/night line and the point directly under the Sun for the selected month and hour.
This is the project's core idea: the same map of Earth, redrawn as if it were made from the Sun's own point of view instead of Earth's. The Sun is always exactly at the center of this map — that's not incidental, it's what the projection is built to guarantee.
Getting there takes three rotations. First, the map spins by the hour, so the meridian currently facing the Sun sits at the front. Then it tilts by the current declination — how far north or south of the equator the Sun sits directly overhead, which depends on the month — so that exact point lands dead center. Finally, it rolls sideways by an amount that keeps Earth's real 23.4° axial tilt fully visible all year. Declination and roll are two faces of that one fixed tilt: declination peaks at the solstices, when Earth leans fully toward or away from the Sun, and drops to zero at the equinoxes — while roll does the exact opposite. So the tilt you see never disappears, it just rotates direction as Earth moves around its orbit.