How the Fenway Park seat and sun data is measured

Every number comes from a USGS lidar survey of the ballpark, NOAA solar equations, the official outfield distances and published row lists. Nothing is estimated from photos.

Sources

Ballpark shape: USGS 3D Elevation Program lidar: Massachusetts Central Eastern 2021 collection, flown 20 March 2021. First-return points gridded to 1 m, noise removed.
Home plate: placed so the measured outfield wall matches the outfield distances in the scan; the fit is within about 1 m.
Section order and direction from home plate: a public ticket map of the ballpark (section and row centre points only). It is not drawn to scale, so it gives each section's direction; distances and heights come from the lidar.
Row lists and covered rows: rateyourseats.com.
Gates, bags, food and policies: the Fenway Park A-Z guide.
Sun: NOAA solar position equations. Weather: ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo.

How shade is computed

Each section is sampled on 3 lines at every row, 8928 seat points in total. For each point the ballpark surface is scanned in every direction the sun can come from, including the upper deck and its roof. A seat is in direct sun when the sun is higher than that horizon. Games are sampled every 10 minutes for 2 hours 55 minutes, on the 15th of each month from April to September, at 1:35 pm, 7:10 pm.

How rows are placed

A line is walked out from home plate through each section and the measured rake is split into decks by height jumps. Rows are spread over the visible slope in front of the published cover row. Premium boxes at the front of the lower bowl use the row positions from the ticket map, with heights from the lidar.

Limits

The lidar was flown on 20 March 2021. The Bleacher Overlook and 521 Overlook added behind the right field Bleachers in 2022 are not in the scan and are not modelled.
The Aura Club (1 to 5), the Dell Technologies Club (1 to 6) and Grandstand 33 are not modelled: the clubs are indoor rooms behind glass and Grandstand 33 runs into the Loge Boxes in the scan.
Covered rows: the Grandstand and Pavilion Boxes are covered per rateyourseats, as are Bleacher rows 39 and up in 37 and 38. Every other cover row is measured from where the deck above starts in the lidar.
Green Monster seats sit on the wall top among light towers and the scoreboard frame. Their rows come from the ticket map with heights from the lidar, and the 1 m scan grid cannot always split a seat from the tower beside it, so their sun minutes are rough.
Loge Boxes 108 to 148 and Right Field Boxes 87 to 89 are covered from the front row by the overhang above in the scan, so they have no seat view and no sun.
Section directions come from a ticket map that is not to scale, so a few sections may be a row or two off along the stand.
Start times vary by date and broadcast; 1:35 pm and 7:10 pm are the most common Red Sox start times. The sun is modelled for mid-month days of the 2027 season.

Downloads (CC BY 4.0)

sun-by-section.csv: month, start time, section, minutes of sun, shade arrival
sections.json: section geometry and row-by-row sightlines