I want 16:9 version of this for my new Desktop Background.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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What's this bit in south America about? 
Could be Falkland islands? They're 3 hours behind UTC, but that time zone band it's in would be for -4 Amazon time
Note how you can't easily see the US because we don't try to bend time to our will
Except for the two thirds of the year where you pretend the entire country (apart from Hawai'i and parts of Arizona) is 1300 km (that's 800 miles for those living in the 17th century) east of where it actually is.
edit: closing bracket
Yeah, and there are totally US state borders on this map. Just like in Russia for example.
The only big recognizable country here is China.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "big", but Chile and Argentina are both extremely recognisable in this map. And Greenland is obviously very easy to see, including Danmarkshavn time.
But I think the single country which is the most recognisable (even more than China, which is messed up a little by Mongolia being in the same time zone) might be India, as well as neighbouring Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Afghanistan and Iran are also nearly perfectly shown here, as is Myanmar.
We literally do though lol
It’s not completely accurate, but I do like this map.
I can't see our Australian coast. We are girt by sea so it should show up and there's space on the map for it.
But yeah regardless this is a very cool map.
Yeah but none of our coast is the edge of a time zone (unless it showed daylight saving), so we're invisible. Kind of cool.
Ohhhhh right I get it 👍
Never mind it's just a cool map!
The most identifiable feature that I went looking for was the kink in the border between Qld and NT/SA. It took me a long time to find because it's further north than expected. And once I found that, it was also really obvious where the coastlines for NT and SA are, since they're on a half-hour offset which means the whole coastline gets shown.
It took me quite a while to find, because it's a lot further north than you'd expect.
But you can see the NT and SA coastlines, as well as the western edge of Cape York Peninsula, and the slightly shifted time zone between western and central time, and the kinked border of Queensland with NT/SA.
The massive wide Chinese time zone is the same zone as WA, and Australia is just south of the narrowest part of that time zone.
Ok so this raises a question that I couldn't answer satisfactorily myself by googling.
Are deviations to time zones a land thing?
What I mean is that the Northern Territory in Australia follows UTC +9.5, despite being in what would be considered the +9 band.
OP's map shows the NT border, but the wiki image on time zones shows the boundary of the time zone extending into the sea between it and Indonesia.
Does the time zone change (between +9 and +9.5) when I step foot in the NT, or does it follow something like the Exclusive Economic Zone?
Great question. This article seems to imply that nautical time zones are used when outside of any country's "terrestrial waters", and this one says they apply "on the high seas".
Following that lead, it looks like both those terms mean when outside any country's EEZ, with the caveat that the former might also refer to the "extended continental shelf".
Really interesting!
I did a bit more searching and found This article, where the author intentionally used EEZ boundaries to make a time zone map that incorporates sovereignty.
He stated that currently Maritime time zones are randomly drawn straight lines on a map, that aren't representative of the country that's forcing change.
randomly drawn straight lines on a map
I mean, they're not random. They're regularly spaced such that there are 24 each at 15 degree increments, such that the Prime Meridian runs through the centre of one zone, and the idealised form of the International Date Line runs through the centre of the opposite one (and then also the one through which the IDL runs gets split in 2).
But thanks for the link, that was a really interesting read!
Perhaps random was the wrong choice of words. The construction of the theoretical time zones is completely non-random. Some of the country specific changes seem to be though.
I was thinking of the time zone carveouts that wrap around some islands - like Kiribati, where the IDL swings around it with giant straight lines that don't resemble it's EEZ. How were they decided? I can't seem to find anything on it.
Seems though, for most international ocean travel, it doesn't matter (per your excellent links- thankyou). Ships just use an idealized date line at 180 until they hit an EEZ and will use that if they need to communicate with that country.
This would have been a really cool album cover in the late 90's.
Is this based purely on UTC offsets?
Are there polygons available for the tz database?
Is this based purely on UTC offsets?
I'm not sure how else it would be done?
Are there polygons available for the tz database?
I presume they are, somewhere. But I didn't make this, and the place I found it wasn't the original source either.
If you make me ruler of the world, I promise I will make it one big time zone and no daylight saving time. Some people will have to adjust that 15:00 is the middle of the night, where they live, but after that it's smooth sailing for everyone.
I'd settle for just no daylight saving time, but that would be great.
Imagine if the first things aliens received from Earth was something like this. They'd have a really fucked up perception of our landmasses, if they even managed to figure out what the hell this was.
Shout out to Belarus and Venezuela
Can we have timezone names?
Thankfully, down the south the time zones are all simple enough that they're easy to count. So your best option is to find one time zone you can easily recognise (I recommend the big wide China time zone, which is UTC+8) and then count along to whichever one you're trying to find.
@Zagorath This kind of has the same vibe for me as the "Unknown Pleasures" cover art
You might also like this:
which is an unlabelled version of this:
