EarthNow v2.0.0

Release notes

Day and night

The globe is now lit by the real sun. A new button on the rail, straight after
the clouds, shows or hides the layer. It shows from the first run, including
for anyone updating. The night side darkens and NASA's Black Marble city
lights show through it; dawn and dusk fade across a twilight band that moves
with the sun, a quarter of a degree a minute.

The sun's place is worked out on your own machine from the time, by NOAA's
solar position equations, so the layer makes no request and works without a
connection. The city lights are a 2016 composite: they show where cities are,
not which lights are on tonight. The guide says so. With the clouds shown too,
clouds over the night side are drawn fainter, so they never glow white against
the dark.

Opens over your part of the world

At launch the globe now faces your own country, as your computer's country or
region setting names it, then starts turning from there. The setting is read
on your machine and sent nowhere. Where it names no country, the globe opens as
before.

Earthquake depth

An earthquake's detail now gives its depth with USGS's own band: shallow
down to 70 km, intermediate down to 300 km, deep below that. A quake beneath high ground can sit
above sea level, which the row says in those words. When USGS cannot compute a
depth it assigns 10 km, so a depth of exactly 10 km is marked as often fixed
rather than measured; the guide explains it. Nothing changes on the globe
itself.

Storm tracks

A storm now draws a faint track behind its marker: the positions its source
gave inside the chosen time window, strongest at the marker. It shows where
the storm has been, never where it is going. A box in Settings hides the
tracks.

Burnt areas

Burnt ground now shows in red, worldwide, from the Global Wildfire Information
System, lying beneath the clouds and the markers. Every day the chosen time
window touches is drawn, so 7 days shows eight days of maps; a short window may
have none mapped yet and says so. The maps are fetched only while shown and
kept for use without a connection. The layer shows from the first run; a box
in Settings hides it.

Replay

Play, beside the time window, replays the chosen window in 30 seconds: events
appear at their own times, storm tracks grow, the sun sweeps round, the burnt
days build up and the clouds move. The slider beside it moves through the
window by hand; its right end is now. Replay's clouds are smaller images
fetched for it and let go when it ends. It shows what the sources hold now
about those days, which may since have been revised.

Fixed: a cluster that would not open

Two events close enough together stayed one cluster however far you zoomed, so
neither could be opened with the pointer. Activating a cluster at the closest
zoom now lists its members; choosing one opens its detail.

The window

The smallest window is now 960 by 700, up from 960 by 640, to make room for
the new rail button.