I left for work at 6:30 this morning in full darkness. It was still dark an hour later. I can’t wait till next week when the sun will be coming up at the beginning of my 100 mile commute, as opposed to the end of it.
Is that right? The equinox is 12 hours of light and dark (you forgot the autumn equinox anyway) - but isn’t the sun still at it’s height at noon (and moves north/south)? Without looking it up, I’ve always assumed that sunrise and sunset gain/lose an equal number of minutes each day.
Joe
It’s right. March 21st is the only day when the Sun is at its zenith at exactly noon. On other days it can vary by as much as 16.5 minutes ahead or behind. It’s about that much ahead today. There are other days when the zenith is at noon, but they’re not the same days every year. Even the autumnal equinox can vary between the 20th and 22nd, I believe.
That’s due to both the tilt of the Earth and its eliptical orbit. (Google on “equation of time” if you want to find out more.)
How much Sun we gain or lose is not really even from day to day. If you want to ballpark it, it’s about a minute per day in middle latitudes. But if you were to graph it, it wouldn’t look like a triangle wave, it would look like a sine wave. (Sort of.) The amount of change per day really slows down around the solstices.
This is just going to come down towards morning people vs. evening people, summer people vs. winter people and outdoor vs. indoor people.
For me, there is no greater pleasure in the world- probably not even sex- than a long summer evening. Next to that, of course, is the pleasure of sleeping late. I’m VERY into the sunshine, and don’t spend a moment indoors that I don’t have to. If I had my way, I’d probably shift all the sunshine to after work hours. What good does the sunshine do me when I’m stuck inside.
So it’s not surprising when I get all huffy when the soul-crushed sons of darkness talk like they want to take my precious sunshine away from me. Even talking about it actually makes me sort of angry.
But of course, I can see the other side of things.
No, it’s more complex than that, mainly because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not a perfect circle. So, the time when the Sun is at its height (i.e., due south or due north, or directly overhead at times in the tropics) goes backwards and forwards around an average local noon.
Thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking, even sven. I picture all the people who want more light in the morning as evil lake goblins.
… or parents.
Switching is not a big deal for me, I guess I’m unique in that matter.
A large part of the time controversy in the USA is the fact the times zones are incorrect to begin with.
For instance Detroit, when time zones were established was in the Central Time Zone. Detroit and other places in Michigan lobbied to get put into the Eastern Time Zone so they’d be in synch with NYC, where the businesses were back then.
So now Detroit is in the Eastern Time Zone, but do you see what just happened? Detroit belongs in the Central Time Zone but by moving to the Eastern Time Zone, what happened was Detroit is an hour ahead of where it should be. In effect Detroit is on Daylight Saving Time all year.
Now come March they move ahead with the rest of the country and so Detroit is TWO hours ahead of where it should be.
This causes more problems then should be.
Since the Earth has 360º and there are 24 hours in a day, each time zone should be 15º. So if you start at the Prime Meridian in the UK, that time zone should be 7.5º to the east of that line and 7.5º west of the line for 15º total.
Then it should continue around the globe.
It would be interesting to see if anyone has a map and could show where the zones should be compared to what they actually are.
You can try this one. Kind of hard to read, though.
Here’s an easier to read one:
As you note, all you really need to do is imagine the longitude lines anyway, which will be straight on the common Mercator projection.
We don’t have DST here in Colombia…thank God! They tried it once and it immediately failed. People were frantic. They cancelled it and have never gone back to it. Amen! Oh, sunrise and sunset are basically the same time all year long anyway.
That’s pretty funny that Colombians were frantic. I remember some Indianan Dopers who had a bit of a panic about it a few years ago. I trust that they’re fine now.
With Colombia being so close to the equator, it wouldn’t make much sense to have it. Probably why Hawaii doesn’t either.
If people want to work from 8:00 until 16:30, why don’t they?
Because in the real world most of us don’t get to pick our hours?
Most people don’t get the option to set their own schedules.
The long summer evenings are there no matter what the clock says.
“Daylight savings” all year long or “standard time” all year long are the same thing, just with slightly different labels on the hours.
Fine, then let’s pick times of the year when all non-agricultural employers and educational institutions will start and finish the dayshift workday one civil hour number earlier or later than the rest of the year, so as to make use of that sunlit time for other activities. That is after all what the ST/DST alternation does, except it uses the contrivance of changing the “civil time” number so the shift applies to everybody and not just those who may take pity on people who want a lot of sunlit time off or who do not want to drop the kids off at school in pitch darkness.
And yes, as alluded before and restated with graphics in recent posts, the legal time zones are all askew for business and political motivations and that has some effect. Detroit, sure. But likewise, most of Texas should be on Mountain time, not “Central”. Heck, look at Europe - France, Spain, the Low Countries, should be in the time zone with Britain, not with Germany and Middle Europe. And then there’s places like China with a single nationwide time zone for a landmass as large as Canada.
Local Note: Puerto Rico is legally AND “naturally” in the AST zone, and being at 18 degrees latitude there is no need to “save daylight”, yet back in '00 a Senator I often work with pushed legislation establishing DST. That was the first damn thing the new majority repealed after he became minority in that year’s election, before it could ever take effect…
I know that, I was just making a per(s)nickety point. You in Arizona have plenty enough daylight anyway without the need to save any more. 
Having Daylight Saving in the summer makes no sense at all. That’s when the temperature is the hottest here in California. I get off work and have to come home to a burning hot house and turn on my air conditioning for hours at a time. It doesn’t start to cool off until 3 hours after sunset, so we should be on double, or even triple Standard Time during the summer. Have the sun rise at 2:30 am and set at 5:30 PM, that would be great. Then we would only have to run the AC at our place of work, instead of all our homes. People who enjoy sunlight can enjoy it on their days off.
Awesome. I get to enjoy sunlight for two whole days a week? Very generous of you.
If you hate sunlight so much, send it up to New England! We’d be more than happy to send you some snow in exchange.