Sunrise Sunset Calendar
Published on Jun 24, 2007 at 9:50 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under calendars, time.
Mary Jo, over at Fly Away Cafe, has posted about a Sunrise Sunset calendar web site. This web site will compute and display sunrise and sunset times for an entire month for a wide variety of locations. It also computes moonrise and moonset times, and it will even compute twilight. It computes all three typical twilights: civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight (In case you don’t know the difference between these, I wrote about these in an earlier posting.). The calendar also gives moon phases.
This is a really nice tool, since sunrise and sunset times vary with the observer’s latitude and longitude. Technically, only the latitude matters in computing sunset times for Local Mean Time. However, your location within your time zone can make clock time vary from Local Mean Time. I wrote about different times in an earlier posting, too.
We recently passed the Summer Solstice, when the Sun appears as far north as it will this year. At that time, the Sun would be directly overhead at noon Local Solar Time at the Tropic of Cancer. That makes the days longest in the northern hemisphere (and shortest in the southern hemisphere). The farther north you are, the longer the days right now, and the farther south, the shorter the days. This will be reversed in December at the Winter Solstice.
A tool like this is really handy for someone who travels for a living like my friend Mary Jo. However, it is also a really useful tool for astronomy students or amateur astronomers. It makes it easy to see quickly when sunrise, sunset, and twilight times will permit observing. With these times being different each day of the year, that makes for a nice tool. So, you might want to check it out.
-Astroprof
CCPhysicist on June 26, 2007 at 4:38 pm: 1
You have been tagged with the “eight facts” meme:
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/06/doubly-tagged.html
I have no idea where you find the time to write these great essays. Maybe that will be one of your facts!