Would you do me a favor and add a line that represents the halfway point between sunrise and sunset? I've had the feeling that the time between sunrise and noon is significantly different from noon to sunset, and by significant I mean more than might be accounted for by the difference between my longitude and the proper center of my timezone.
I first read "There are three colorful wives coming out of that bomb"...and was ready for some kind of new Boston based reality tv show!
LAN3, done. The little white dotted line is the time you asked for, varying by a bit over half an hour over the course of a year -- more of course if you include DST considerations.
http://www.nhbungalow.com/NETID.html
I always like that the earliest sunset occurs in early December - before the winter solstice.
The article reminded me how I kind of miss the later sunsets of Cleveland.
Thanks! Yeah, it's what I suspected, more or less. It makes sense that it should be noon-centered, but I just wasn't getting that feeling when I considered the sunrise/set times I was reading from time to time, but I'm glad a comprehensive examination demonstrates a rational universe!
Hmm, now I'm looking at your DST line-breaks and I'm trying to think of the best way to calculate the two comparable areas that would represent daylight with DST vs. without. Did you pick 6AM and PM arbitrarily, or in that they represent the half of the day that's centered on noon?
Right (0)/6/12/18/(24) seemed like a nice "orderly" progression.
I have to say I don't think you described your issue very well, because obviously the "entire area" of daylight is constant w/ or with out DST :-) but if you picked a fixed starting time to plot, then there would obviously be a big jolt at the change.
Well, the usual working-man's pitch for the benefits of DST is "it'll give you an extra hour of sunlight.
So I'm trying to figure out what they had in mind-- was it aimed mainly at the people who normally got up (by a clock) after sunrise, but thanks to DST, they get up before sunrise now? And that population varies considerably over the course of the summer, as we can see.
I guess I want to play with the times I actually wake up and see what's in my personal daylight savings account. (I know it's properly "daylight saving" but I can't pass up the "banking daylight" gag that always goes with it.)
Hence my question of why you chose 6 o'clocks; most people are, I think, up more than 12 hours, but you can see that a person who is awake from 6 to 6 gets two different daylight areas, depending on whether they observe DST or not. I, on the other hand, sleep until, say, 8, which is always in sunlight, DST or not.
The novelty might wear off before long, but it'd be neat to have a clock/calendar application that lets you know where you are in that graph and tell you interesting things such as how much daylight you have left, how much you got today compared to yesterday or tomorrow, etc.
Maybe my Excel-fu is up to this....