fun with science

This grew out of a conversation in eub's journal. I started to comment there, but it got long and off of his original topic, so here I am.

I had always assumed that the main factor in determining local sunrise/sunset time was your east-west placement within the time zone. (Yes, very far north things would get wonky around solstices, but somehow I thought not so much otherwise.) That is, New York City and Pittsburgh are both in the same time zone, but the sun sets in New York about half an hour before it sets here. By definition, you can have variation of up to an hour within a single time zone.

But it turns out that the north-south position is much more important. Using my longitude (80W) and this tool, I played around with different lattitudes. ( Read more... )