How long is a day?
At first I thought that this was a very simple answer, but decided to check it anyways, and found some interesting information on the subject! Here’s what I found: It’s actually a trick question. You’d think that a day on Earth lasts 24 hours… but it doesn’t. Oh sure, the sun returns to the same position once every 24 hours, but there are two things happening at the same time. For starters, the Earth actually takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete one rotation on its axis. In other words, a specific location on Earth takes this long to come back to the same position relative to the background stars. Astronomers call this length of time a “sidereal day”. Obviously you’d expect us to lose 4 minutes a day at this rate. Eventually day and night would flip, and it would be madness. So why doesn’t that happen? Once you take into account the fact that the Earth is also orbiting around the Sun, everything adds up to 24 hours. The location of the background stars move about 1°/da
you can calcualate the length of the day by subtracting the sunrise and sunset times . see the sunrise and sunset times here: http://www.happyzebra.com/timezones-worldclock/sunrisesunset.
