Earliest sunset

So which day of the year has the earliest sunset time? It isn't the winter solstice - December 21st/22nd - in case that was your guess. Using the USNO calculator, I reckon the earliest sunset in Cheshire (UK) is 15:50 GMT on 13th December (the days either side have the same time so I took the mean). So why should the earliest sunset not be on the shortest day? This is all because the axis of rotation of the Earth is tilted with respect to the Sun and the Earth travels in an elliptical orbit. It is very complicated to think about and John Holtz has a good page explaining it.

By the way, for those that care about these things, the Winter solstice for 2006 it

is at 00:22 on the 22nd December.

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Monday 11th Dec 2006 (14:40 CET) | 5 Comments | Permalink

Comments: Earliest sunset

And the great part about it from my perspective, is that i get paid the same for these short days! Of course, in June, i get paid for the longer days...

Posted by Stephen on Monday 11th Dec 2006 (15:24 UTC)

Funnily enough I recently added a graph of sunrise/sunset times for my location to my site. Although the detail isn't that great you can clearly see that the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset are on different days and neither happen on the solstice.

I use the sunrise/sunset calculation tool that's part of x10 Ephem.

Posted by Dave Pearson on Monday 11th Dec 2006 (18:17 UTC)

Hey, that's really interesting! I never thought of that before.

Posted by Ian Musgrave on Monday 11th Dec 2006 (20:45 UTC)

can u tell me more about my horoscope for the year 2008

Posted by Nundlall Roshan on Wednesday 19th Dec 2007 (11:00 UTC)

Nundlall, no I can't. I'm an astronomer, not an astrologer.

Posted by Stuart on Wednesday 19th Dec 2007 (15:17 UTC)

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