Why does the sun rise and set at different times?
Tomorrow the sun will rise a little earlier and set a little later than it did today. This will happen every day until June 22. Then every sunrise until December 21 will be a bit later and every sunset a bit earlier. This is because the earth’s axis is not perpendicular to its orbit. Our planet is a dizzy dancer, spinning around its axis as it races around its orbit. The sun is always shining on half the globe and each side keeps spinning from daylight to darkness. The axis is a line through the globe from pole to pole. You would expect the dividing line between night and day to pass straight through the poles. If it did, all the days and nights would be equal. Sunrise would be at the same time every day and so would the sunset. But throughout the world, except at the equator, the days and nights are equal only twice each year. This is because the earth ‘.s axis is tipped. The dizzy dancer leans a little as it spins on its way around the sun. The axis is tipped 23 1/2 degrees from the
It’s because the earth’s axis of rotation is tilted to the plane of its orbit. The best way to picture this is with a globe. Shine a flashlight on one in a dark room. Then turn it. Make sure you are shining the light horizontally. You will see that if you are shining it from the direction of one pole, that the near hemisphere is more than half lit. The far hemisphere is less than half lit. Then if you shine it from straight out from the equator, both hemispheres are exactly half lit. This is what happens as the earth goes around the sun. Because of the angle of rotation, you can see that any given part of the world will have varying lengths of day and night as you move the flashlight around the globe. You will see that latitude has a lot to do with it, too, as the arctic regions spend a period of time when the sun doesn’t cross the horizon at all in the course of 24 hours. Now the main difference between the model and the real thing is that the earth orbits the sun, not the other way a
