batjorge icons · Live sky
batjorge.com · new icon · live sky

An icon that follows your sky

The icon changes with the time of day where you are and with the real phase of the moon. Someone in the USA looking at the same moment might see the sun while you see the moon. Every visitor gets a fractal of the day (12 of them: Mandelbrot, Julia sets, Menger sponge, Apollonian, Koch, Sierpinski, dragon curve, fern, Pythagoras tree…), picked at random and changing every day at noon. By day it shines as a golden sun, at night it is the moon, lit in the real moon phase: the same fractal waxes, gets full and wanes.

The tab icon of this page is already live. Use the sliders to travel through a day or a month of nights, or click any card below to see that one.

Right now for you
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How it would work on batjorge.com: a few lines of JavaScript pick the icon when a page opens, from the visitor’s clock and the date (the moon phase is calculated, no location needed), and refresh it every few minutes. The daily fractal comes from the date plus a random number the visitor’s browser keeps for itself: no IP address, no cookie, nothing is sent to the server. It changes at noon, so it never switches in the middle of a night. Search engines and browsers without JavaScript get one fixed icon. The moon is drawn as seen from the northern hemisphere.
Colours:

loading the drawing…

Each card: the icon at 120 px; then 16, 32 and 48 px at real size; the dashed box is the real 16 px pixels shown 3× bigger; then a browser tab on a light and a dark theme. Drafts only: nothing on the site changes until you pick one.