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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The earth tilts a bit throughout the year so that in the summer, the pole is tilted towards the sun and in the winter the pole is tilted away. The easiest way to think of this is to imagine what would happen if the earth tilted all the way so that it’s axis faced the sun and it was basically rolling around on its side. One pole would get constant sun basically as if it was always noon and the other would have constant midnight and the equator would have permanent twilight.
Obviously the earth doesn’t tilt nearly that much, but near the poles where you’re already kind of close to the “constant twilight” state all it takes is a small tilt to get constant daylight or night. The key is that the sun is always near the horizon (just above or just below) rather than straight overhead in those cases so it’s more like constant dawn/dusk.
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