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Wednesday, June 23, 2004Why it pays to have a Rocket Scientist in the Family
My cousin Ken e-mailed me today. He wrote:
I read your website about wanting to see the sun set on the longest day of the year. As you said, summer soltace is the exact time when spring turns to summer, the sun's daily highest point in the sky begins to decrease, and yes the days do start to get shorter. However, for some reason I remember that the LASTEST sunset doesn't occur on the summer solstace. As you can see from this website http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=251&obj=sun&month=6&year=2004&day=1, the LATEST sunset occurs between June 25 and 30 in Trenton at 8:33pm. In NYC, the latest sunset occurs at 8:31pm on June 22-July 1. I'm not sure why summer solstace doesn't coincide with the latest sunset, but some factors may be: 1) Longitude west of the center of the time zone (which explains why sunset is later in Trenton than NYC). 2) The apogee of the earth's orbit (when the earth is furthest away from the sun, approximately July 2) doesn't coincide with the soltace. 3) Altitude and slope of the city (not likely). 4) Latitude north of the equator (at the equator, by the way, daytime is always 12 hours long). It's probably a combination of these and other factors that makes the year's LATEST sunset different from year's LONGEST day. I'm confident you can figure it out using web research. So if you want to see the latest sunset, there's still time! See, how cool is that? Thanks, Ken!
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