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nebroadweI'm a fan of detail when writing 'fic, as you've probably noticed. Historical fiction set in the real world sends me scrambling for FACTS (what was the weather like that day? what news would people have been talking about? would they have known that word or expression?). Some facts are easier to determine than others. Right now, I'm on a sky-and-weather binge, so I note some of the places I've found helpful for locating that information (primarily so I don't forget them; secondarily so that anyone reading this can skip the "Help! How do I find out about that?" phase of research).
The U.S. Naval Observatory offers a neat little app that provides you with sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset and twilight times for any location in the world that you care to ask about, right here. They also have an app that provides you with all the sun/moon information for any location on any day -- including moonphase -- here. Catch: for non-US locations you need to enter a time zone (east or west of Greenwich) and a latitude/longitude, but they helpfully include web locations where you can find those data. For a complete picture of the sky, from anywhere at (almost) any time, YourSky is my go-to app. Their "horizon view" option is particularly helpful for getting a sense of what the night sky would look like to an observer standing on the ground. Again, you need the latitude and longitude and the time of day in Universal Time of your location.
Weather is a lot trickier. Recent weather statistics (from the last decade or two) are easy to find -- just check the weather service or meteorological office that covers whatever place you want to know about. (Some sites have longer historical data trails than others; it helps to investigate on various levels: city, state, nation). Historical weather statistics require more digging, particularly if you want to avoid reading newspapers in microfilm. (What can I say? I'm lazy.) I've been focusing on Europe lately (specifically, Munich) and have unearthed a couple of helpful sites. Daily barometric pressure maps for Europe from 1880 through 1949 live here -- this site, Wetterzentrale.de, is in German, so H stands for "high" and T for "low" (i.e. "tief"). Elsewhere on the same site you can see daily weather station data from various sites in Germany from 1876 through the present (including max/min temps, rainfall and snowfall totals, and maximum wind gusts), but the number of reporting stations for the early years is much smaller than for the later ones. The map also shows no geographical data other than the borders of modern Germany, so you need to know what you're looking at before you pull this up. I found monthly average temperatures for Munich from 1781-1992 here -- in degrees Celsius, of course -- and monthly preciptation totals for Munich from 1848-1992 here in (I presume) centimeters. All of which will have some effect on my next creative piece. (A good one, I hope.)
So far, so good! I'll be investigating further -- and I welcome input from anyone who's been down this path already and knows what to look for/at ...
The U.S. Naval Observatory offers a neat little app that provides you with sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset and twilight times for any location in the world that you care to ask about, right here. They also have an app that provides you with all the sun/moon information for any location on any day -- including moonphase -- here. Catch: for non-US locations you need to enter a time zone (east or west of Greenwich) and a latitude/longitude, but they helpfully include web locations where you can find those data. For a complete picture of the sky, from anywhere at (almost) any time, YourSky is my go-to app. Their "horizon view" option is particularly helpful for getting a sense of what the night sky would look like to an observer standing on the ground. Again, you need the latitude and longitude and the time of day in Universal Time of your location.
Weather is a lot trickier. Recent weather statistics (from the last decade or two) are easy to find -- just check the weather service or meteorological office that covers whatever place you want to know about. (Some sites have longer historical data trails than others; it helps to investigate on various levels: city, state, nation). Historical weather statistics require more digging, particularly if you want to avoid reading newspapers in microfilm. (What can I say? I'm lazy.) I've been focusing on Europe lately (specifically, Munich) and have unearthed a couple of helpful sites. Daily barometric pressure maps for Europe from 1880 through 1949 live here -- this site, Wetterzentrale.de, is in German, so H stands for "high" and T for "low" (i.e. "tief"). Elsewhere on the same site you can see daily weather station data from various sites in Germany from 1876 through the present (including max/min temps, rainfall and snowfall totals, and maximum wind gusts), but the number of reporting stations for the early years is much smaller than for the later ones. The map also shows no geographical data other than the borders of modern Germany, so you need to know what you're looking at before you pull this up. I found monthly average temperatures for Munich from 1781-1992 here -- in degrees Celsius, of course -- and monthly preciptation totals for Munich from 1848-1992 here in (I presume) centimeters. All of which will have some effect on my next creative piece. (A good one, I hope.)
So far, so good! I'll be investigating further -- and I welcome input from anyone who's been down this path already and knows what to look for/at ...