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Documentation Index

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Helios is a web app that calculates the optimal seat side — left or right — for any ground journey. Enter your origin, destination, departure time, and sun/shade preference, and Helios works out exactly where to sit at every stage of the trip using solar-position mathematics and great-circle routing.

Introduction

Learn what Helios does and how it models your journey

Quickstart

Run Helios locally in under five minutes

Core Algorithm

Understand the sun/shade logic that drives every result

API Reference

Explore the serverless geocoding and timezone endpoints

What Helios solves

When you travel in a vehicle, the sun moves relative to your direction of travel. Depending on whether it is before or after solar noon, and whether you are heading north or south, the sun falls on one side of the vehicle. Helios maps this mathematically so you can plan your seat in advance.
1

Set your preferences

Choose whether you want sun or shade, and whether you can change seats mid-trip.
2

Enter origin and departure time

Pick the city, country, date, and time you are leaving from.
3

Enter destination and arrival time

Pick where you are going and when you expect to arrive.
4

Get your seat recommendation

Helios returns a per-segment seat recommendation with exact times, accounting for sunrise, sunset, and solar noon along the route.

Key features

Solar-accurate calculations

Uses two independent solar libraries to compute solar noon, sunrise, and sunset at every point along the route.

Multi-day route support

Handles journeys spanning multiple days by iterating through each day’s solar events along the great-circle path.

Time zone awareness

Optionally adjusts all displayed times to the local clock at each point — useful for long cross-zone trips.

Privacy-first API design

The browser never calls third-party APIs directly. All geocoding and timezone lookups go through same-origin Vercel serverless functions that hold keys server-side.

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