I’m right on Lake Michigan’s western shore, so my standard time aligns pretty closely with solar time. Based on my longitude, I’m about 9 minutes earlier by the clock than the sun time.
Some poor folks are so far off that their standard noon on the clock occurs as early as 9 AM or as late as 3PM or more in sun time.
The way most time zones are set up it seems most folks value more sunshine later in the day rather than having it earlier. Even without throwing in Daylight Saving Time.
So how far off actual solar time are you, and do you notice? I sure don’t. Not with a less than 10 minute difference.
I live in Michigan, which is near the western edge of the Eastern time zone. Around here, the sun rises late and sets late. Mornings are very dark in the winter, but in the summer, it’s light until very late in the evening.
I used to live in Madison, Wisconsin, where the opposite was true: the sun came up really early in the summer and really late in the evening.
Many years ago my family took a trip to east Africa, very close to the equator where it’s about twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, regardless of season. It was weird to me that in the middle of the summer, the sun would set so early in the evening.
I’m about a 90-minute drive east (inland) from San Jose, CA. The map seems to put that at about -0.2 hours, or about 10 to 15 minutes or so. That’s close enough for my purposes, I suppose.
In Cape Town the difference is 35-50 min, depending on the time of year. We should really be in the next time zone, but for convenience South Africa has one very wide time zone.
Today sunrise is 5:28am and sunset 7:50pm. Solar noon is at 12:39pm. In midwinter daylight is about 7:50am - 5:45pm
Here just south of London, my solar noon is less than a minute off GMT. That said, I believe we have (at least) two UK based dopers who can beat that - but I’ll leave it up to them as to whether they choose to reveal themselves or not.
He says he’s in Minnesota, so I guess that’s getting pretty close to the place where days are the shortest. As he gets farther from Minnesota, the days will get longer. Is that how it works?
Sorry, I thought it was obvious I was joking. I was poking fun at the SDMB culture of asking for cites for everything - specifically here the unsupported claim that days will get longer after the shortest day.
We really really need that head-smack emoji from the old vBulletin days. (I think it was mentioned that it was a custom-made smiley done by a Doper here.)
The face-palm emoji in the Discourse collection just doesn’t cut it.
Of course it varies through the year. Since I am at about 73 1/2 west, I know that, on average, our noon has to be 6 minutes early. Today, the sun rose at 7:26 and set at 4:10, so our noon would have been around 11:48. The reason for the variance is that the earth’s orbit around the sun is not circular and the solar day is shorter when, as now, the earth is heading towards perihelion (closest approach).
Metro New York City here. Only 3 minutes off. Woo hoo!
Both me and the Mrs dislike early and late sunrises, and early and late sunsets too. She asked me if there’s any solution short of constantly moving back and forth between the N/S hemispheres, and I suggested moving to Ecuador. Turns out that as much as we dislike the extremes, 6am/6pm all year round would be boring!
Are you talking about the Equation of Time? This indeed affects the time of noon by up to ~15 minutes due to the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit and the obliquity of the ecliptic.
I was going to answer “yes”, and then I read the beginning of the wiki article that you kindly linked to.
That article says that the Equation of Time is about the difference between Apparent Solar Time and Mean Solar Time. But the comments we’ve been making about our localities are about the difference between Solar Time and Standard Time.
I had thought that (for a location whose longitude is an exact multiple of 15 degrees) Mean Solar Time is the same thing as Standard Time. But now I’m not so sure.
