Sunrise and sunset
The sun in the drawing rises at the county's actual sunrise, follows its calculated path across the sky, and sets at actual sunset. The background changes through dawn, day, golden hour, dusk, and night to match the time of day.
How this website works
A Living Website
The illustration on the county homepage is not a photograph and it is not a video. It is a drawing of Lonoke County that your browser redraws once a minute to match the county's current sunlight, moon phase, season, and National Weather Service forecast.
The sky
The sun and moon follow the county's own sky
Your browser calculates the position of the sun over the county seat — 34.755° N, 91.900° W — using a simplified form of the solar-position method published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Moon phase
After sunset the moon appears over the bayou at tonight's actual phase — crescent, quarter, gibbous, or full — with the lit side on the correct side. Stars appear, and the light on the water changes from sunlight to moonlight.
County weather
The drawing reads the National Weather Service hourly forecast for the county's forecast grid. Rain, snow, fog, cloud, thunderstorms, and wind in that forecast are shown in the scene.
The land
The scene also changes with the season and the time of day
The land changes with the season: green with drifting cottonwood seed in spring, falling leaves in autumn, and light snow in winter. The number of birds and fireflies in the scene changes through the day on a fixed schedule written into the page. It follows a pattern of typical county activity; it is not a measurement of traffic:
- Weekday school and commute hours put the most birds over the rice fields, in the morning and again in the late afternoon.
- Quiet hours — the middle of the day, and Sundays — show fewer.
- Spring and summer nights bring fireflies over the bayou, and more of them at the quietest hours.
The notice bar at the top of every page checks the National Weather Service's list of active alerts for Lonoke County. When there is an active alert, the bar shows it and turns red without anyone updating the site by hand. That is the only automatic alerting on this site, and it does not replace an official emergency notification. To be contacted directly, sign up with the county Office of Emergency Management on the Fire & Emergency page.
Drawn, not photographed
Every part of the scene — the lone oak, the egret, the rice rows, the courthouse seal — is vector art written directly into the page. It uses less data than a single photograph and stays sharp at any screen size.
Your visit is not tracked
The sun, moon, season, and activity calculations all run on your own device. The only data the scene requests is the National Weather Service's public forecast and alert feed for the county. The site carries no advertising trackers, no social-media pixels, and no third-party analytics. Details are in our privacy policy.
Reduced motion is respected
If your device is set to reduce motion, the animation, drift, and weather effects are turned off and the page is shown as a still document.
Why it was built this way
The reason for the design
The homepage is the page most residents see first. Showing the county's own daylight, season, and weather is a way of making a public website look like the place it serves rather than a generic template, without slowing the page down or making it harder to read.
Everything the scene shows comes from public data: the National Weather Service forecast and alert feed, and calculations your browser performs on its own. Nothing on this page is connected to the county's outdoor warning sirens or to any other emergency notification system.
The page is built with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on ordinary static hosting. There is no subscription platform behind it.
See it on the homepage
Open the homepage
Or use a preview link to see the scene in a different sky.