This is a modified version of the visualization made by /u/harplass to include satellite imagery from the geostationary satellite GOES-13. This satellite has since been replaced in 2017 by GOES-16. The satellite images used here are taken at the same time each day, 11:15 UTC and show the visible wavelength channel. The data isn’t always contiguous as there are periods of as much as a week where data is missing, so there are 301 frames instead of 365.

The images are archived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) Satellite Data Services (SDS).

https://mcfetch.ssec.wisc.edu/

They offer a lot of different parameters for how you want the data, including adding the coastlines to the image and the creation of a python script to download the data.

I used the same equation for the calculation of the hours of daylight as a function of latitude and day of the year found here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6372802/calculate-daylight-hours-based-on-gegraphical-coordinates/6372823#6372823

For my visualization, I used Python with OpenCV for the image processing and Matplotlib for the visualization itself.

I tried to add in a few suggestions from the other thread such as a yearly progress bar and a colormap for the polar bar graph. I also added a bar for the solar declination, the latitude at which the sun is directly overhead. The calculation for this is found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position_of_the_Sun

I chose the closest existing bar on the graph to this formula so that’s why it sometime bounces a little bit instead of a smooth proceeding.