Drag the glowing torch to move the light: only from its spot does the skyline come together.

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Shadow skyline

A small print that looks like a few abstract ridges. Shine your phone torch past it in a dark room and the real skyline of your mountains, or your city, appears on the wall, with its name in letters of light.

The skyline

Click the map, or drag the pin, to stand somewhere else. The wedge shows which way you look.

Or start from an example

Facing

Click the shadow picture above to face that way.

How far to look Eye height above the ground

The sculpture

Width Mountain height

The skyline is raised so it shows on the wall.

Name in the shadow

Cut the name into the shadow, as letters of light Engrave terraprinter.com under the base

Your light and wall

Torch to sculpture Torch height above the table

Stand your phone on its side in the stand, camera at the bottom, and measure from the table to the middle of the torch.

Torch to wall

Any wall distance works: further away the shadow gets bigger and softer, closer it gets smaller and sharper.

Print a phone stand that clips to the base

Phone thickness with its case

Colours

Download

Free for personal use, and for selling up to $5,000 a year with a TerraPrinter credit. Bigger sellers need a commercial license. Keep the data credits. License

How the shadow is made

The real skyline

For mountains, sightlines go out from where you stand over real elevation data, with the Earth's curve included, and the highest point each one meets is the skyline. For a city, the outline and height of every building in view comes from OpenStreetMap.

Shaped along the light

A torch throws a shadow that grows with distance. The sculpture is the skyline drawn backwards along the torch's rays, so from the torch's spot its edge lines up with the skyline on the wall at any distance.

Hidden in slices

In the hidden skyline each slice carries its own stretch of the view, larger the further back it stands, among extra ridges whose shadows fall inside the rest. From the side it is just a cluster of ridges; from the torch they join into one skyline.

Ideas to try

The mountains from a summit you climbed, a city skyline from across the water where you got engaged, a desk piece for a hiker, or a night light for a child's room that shows their home town.

Elevation: Copernicus GLO-30 (© DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA) and Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others). Buildings: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO. Want the skyline itself? See the view from here and backlit shadow boxes, open the TerraPrinter app or see more 3D map gift ideas.