The Red Ferret Journal

Sun Times is a very cool freeware program which provides more information than you’re ever going to need on sunrise/sunset times, climate averages and global flight schedules and routes. The data is constantly updated and you can run cool time based animations to view astronomical movements and temperature changes for just about every place on earth. The maps are a little crude, and the interface takes some getting used to, but the lush dataset more than makes up for it. This is a must have tool if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, and could even be useful when trying to pick your next vacation destination based on weather patterns.

 The climate features display expected seasonal temperatures and precipitation, estimates of current temperatures based on the local time of day, tables of in depth climate data, and illustration of departures from long-term climate averages (for year 2000 onwards). The aviation features allow some of the scheduled worldwide commercial flights to be plotted and animated, airline route networks to be illustrated and tabulated, timetabled departure and arrival boards to be generated, and idealised airspace capacity demands to be plotted.