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It is an incredible image that appears to show Manhattan 'breathing' over the course of a day.

In fact, this image shows commuters as they travel through the city.

It shows commuters in work in orange, and at home home in blue, tracking their journey through the city as the day unfolds.

The map reveals commuter's movement during the day, appearing to show Manhattan 'breathing' through the course of the day. commuters at home are in blue, and in orange when they are at work - with Midtown turning white because of the huge number of workers that descend on it.

The map was created by Joey Cherdarchuk of DarkHorse Analystics, who says he was inspired by recent pictures of a 'Breathing Earth'.

'Inspired by John Nelson's breathing earth, I wondered if I could make a breathing city,' he said.

'Manhattan looks somewhat lung-like, so it seemed natural.'

However, he admitted the project was actually far more complex than he first thought.

'Should be a fun, quick project - how naive I was.'

After investigating the project the data was taken from four different places for population, employment, land use, and building footprints.

After wrestling with software for several hours, Cherdarchuk had a 'dead' map of the city.

'So now I can make a plot that doesn't breathe.

'But I want to show change in the typical workday. I'm gonna need more data for that.

The map reveals the incredible movement through Manhattan. At 3pm (left image) workers are congregated in work, with Midtown becoming a hotspot. However, at midnight (right image) they are at home, spread around the city. The black rectangle in the middle of the image is Central Park.

'Several searches and false starts later we find work related activity percentages by time of day.

'Manhattan probably has a different profile than the US average, but close enough.'

He then set about creating the final map.

'Each dot is a person, so I can't just have them flicking on and off randomly to match the time of day percentages.

'They need to go to work for a while then come home for a while, so I need to give each dot a schedule.

'Maybe this is overkill, but I can't stop now. More searching finds us a rough hours of work distribution, and now I'm forced to assign schedules to the ~1.5 million people living in Manhattan and the ~2 million people working in Manhattan.'

He used Excel to create over 200 schedules with probabilities to match those profiles, giving them to each person.

'Finally we have data for each of 24 hours for both home and work.

'We're making some huge simplifying assumptions, but we have a reasonable data set.'

After finally finishing the map, Cherdarchuk  admitted it was perhaps slightly more complex than he first thought.

'See, it is super easy and takes almost no time at all to create something like this, as long as your definitions of 'super easy' and 'no time' are flexible enough to include difficult and time-consuming.