Okay I know this is like 4th grade science or something, but I think with my stroke I just can’t seem to picture why the sun is “on” or “off” for most of the day up at the North Pole or down at South Pole, and yet at the equator days are very regular year ’round.
I keep picturing the Earth on its axis, but I just can’t seem to figure out how the sun shines differently at different latitudes.
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You know how in the summer the days are longer and the nights are shorter?
How the sun will rise very early in the morning and set late in the evening in the summer and in the winter it will be the other way around with sun not rising until it is already very later in the morning and setting very early in the afternoon?
This phenomenon gets more and more extreme as you go further away from the equator.
At high latitudes the sun will only be up for a few hours in the winter and in the summer it will set very late at night and rise very early in the morning.
If you go beyond the arctic circle, it will get so extrem that at some point in the summer the sun will not really set at all. It will dip down towards the horizon and rise up again without ever having fully set.
In the winter it is the other way around the sun almost rises around but it never quite makes it above the the horizon and never gets beyond twilight.
If you go closer to the poles the time the sun stays up or down becomes longer and at the poles you have basically a long never ending day during the summer and a night that last all throughout winter.
The reason for this is that the earth’s axis is tilted.
The earth’s axis, around which the earth spins once per day, goes from pole to pole.
If that axis was at a right angle to the direction the sun is days would always be the same length and we would have no seasons.
However it isn’t quite the axis is slightly tilted.
Around the end of June the south pole points away from the sun and the north pole towards it. The south pole and the area around it doesn’t get any sunlight not matter how much the earth turns because it is on the dark side of the earth.
The axis keeps pointing into the same direction all year long. but as the earth moves to be on the other side of the sun, what was a tilt away from the sun becomes a tilt towards it.
During the end of December the north pole points away from the sun and the south pole towards it. The south pole gets sunlight and the north pole doesn’t
Throughout the year the axis goes from pointing away from the sun in the northern hemisphere to being completely perpendicular to the sun towards the end of march and pointing away from it near the end of June to being perpendicular again in the end of September and pointing away from it again shortly before x-mas.
When the axis points away from the sun the days are shortest and nights are longest, when it is at an right angle the day and night are exactly equally long and when it points towards the sun the nights are shortest and the days are longest.
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