My family vacations in Maine most years, and because it’s so far north and east, the sun rises egregiously early around the summer solstice. I was looking up the sunrise times on a chart and noticed that the earliest sunrise did not line up with the longest day. It was about a week earlier. Additionally, the latest sunset is about a week after the solstice. At the winter solstice, the latest sunrise and earliest sunset are even further off, about two weeks in either direction from the solstice.
I thought that the math behind this calculation would make for good content for an article, but the true reason behind the anomaly is much more interesting than a simple calculation, and has significantly altered my understanding of time itself.
Continue reading “The Sunrise, The Clock, And The Map That Covers Everything”