Time and Date website shows **12 hours 3 minutes** of daylight in my hometown, Calgary, AB, Canada.
[https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/calgary](https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/calgary)
In: 2
12h is not the maximum amount of daylight any one spot can receive. Once you go above or below certain latitudes, you can get uninterrupted daylight for weeks at a time.
Also, the place opposite you is getting the opposite amount of time, so when you were getting less than 12, they must have been getting more than 12.
Because sunrise/sunset aren’t defined how you think
On the equinox, the sun should be above the horizon for 12 hours intuitively, but we didn’t define sunrise/sunset in a way that results in that(by the middle of the sun crossing the geographic horizon)
Sunrise and sunset are defined as when the first and last bit of the sun cross the visible horizon. The sun is 16 arc minutes in radius, and the atmosphere refracts the sun up by about 34 arc minutes so sunrise is actually when the center of the sun is 50 arc minutes below the horizon so instead of sunrise and sunset being 90 degrees around the circle from solar noon they’re 90.83 degrees around
The end result is that both Calgary Canada and Melbourne Australia can receive more than 12 hours of sunlight on the same day.
You’re not at the equator. The equinox is the day when the equator should get 12 hours of sunlight. The farther north you go, the more you’ll get on the equinox.
The way sunlight enters the atmosphere can also impact daylight hours. This means that while in theory the sun should give you 12 hours, after it enters the atmosphere, you might end up with more or less.
Latest Answers