Our notion of time has evolved with our increasingly finite abilities to measure and track time. Before the invention of clocks and mechanical time, we watched the sky and chased the sun, the celestial bodies’ irregular rhythms determining the hour.

This, though, was not enough and we eventually divorced timekeeping from the heavens, placing ourselves under the fixed watch of machine dictated time. As our ability to measure time has become more finite, our world too has become smaller and smaller, and our experience of time faster and faster.

Time, at one point, was local. Each town kept its own time, but with the advance of trains, local time caused chaos in our ability to travel. As we collapsed our ideas of distance and space, we collapsed our notion of time, carving up the world into 24 time zone boundaries, each zone one hour ahead or behind its neighbor.

The following timezone map shows all sunset or sunrise photos uploaded to Instagram in the past day. Hover over a point on the map to see the corresponding photograph. Use the search bar in the upper right corner to search for a location and zoom in on photographs taken at your favorite city, park, or landmark.