I live in Asia so I spent my whole life having sunset between 6 to 630pm so by that time everywhere was pretty dark and the streetlamps came on. I was pretty shocked later in life when I found out that there are parts of the world like in Europe or the States where it’d still be bright out at fucking 730 or even 8pm. How come? I know that they are behind by Asia and Australia by some hours but why does the sun set later there too?
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There are three factors which determine when the sun sets:
1. Seasons. During summer the sun sets later than during winter.
2. Latitude. The farther you are from the equator, the more daylight time difference between summer and winter. For example, on the equator the day is pretty much 12 hours long all year round, while close to the poles the sun doesn’t even go below the horizon during summer (so it’s constant daytime) or above the horizon during winter (so it’s constant nighttime).
3. Relation to the time zone. If you’re on the western edge of your time zone, the sun will rise and set ~~earlier~~ later than if you’re on the eastern edge of the same time zone. So for example the sun will rise and set much later in Spain than in Croatia.
Time zones aren’t perfect, look at a map of time ones and you’ll see.
Also it changes depending on how close you are to the equator, equator countries get more sunlight while northern and southern countries get less
This is because the Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.4°. As the year progresses, the amount of daylight changes. The further towards the Poles you are from either Tropic, the bigger shift you’ll see in the length of day during a year.
As an extreme example, in the summer, areas north of the Arctic Circle never get dark, because the Sun never drops below the horizon and vice versa, in peak winter, the sun never rises.
Visual aid: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Axial_tilt_vs_tropical_and_polar_circles.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Axial_tilt_vs_tropical_and_polar_circles.svg)
The farther you get from the equator, the more extreme the sunset and sunrise times become. I live in the middle of Sweden, and in summer, when the North Pole lean towards the sun, it’s light out from very early to very late. On midsummer, the sun only dips just below the horizon, and it never really gets dark. In winter, when the pole leans away form the sun, it’s only light out for about six hours at the worst. At the same time, far southern countries have lots of sunlight. Go above the polar circle, and you’ve no sunset at all mid summer, and no sunrise at all mid winter.
Draw a circle. Now draw a line right through the middle. Now move to the right and draw a line through the circle again, the same length as the first line. You’ll notice a shorter amount of it is in the circle.
The line represents the path of the sun and when you get closer to the edges of the circle that represents being further from the equator. The sun travels the same distance everywhere but hits the earth less towards the poles, causing it to leave (set) earlier than places closer to the equator.
This happens because our axis is tilted. The times of sunrise and sunset happen differently each day as the earth orbits the sun and changes slightly which part receives full sun. And, of course, the north and south hemispheres are opposite, so while one half has an earlier sunset than the equator, the other half has a later one. This dance of shorter and longer days is what gives us our seasons.
This has nothing to do with time zones.
Sunrise and sunset depend on the time of year and your latitude.
The earth is tilted relative to the sun. If you take a ball, stab a stick through the middle, draw a circle around the stick, turn on a light, and tilt the ball, only a certain amount of that circle is lit by the light. If you then move the ball to the other side of the light, a different amount of the circle will be lit.
Because the earth always takes 24h to rotate no matter where you are, this results in the day changing length. This is the exact same thing as what causes seasons.
The reason different places on earth have different sunset/sunrise times is because the difference in illumination is a lot more extreme near the poles than near the equator. At the equator, half of the circle is always lit whilst at the poles it’s either completely lit or not lit at all.
Depending on how far from the equator you are, the variance in sunrise/sunset can differ. Along the equator, it’s basically the same year round. There are places in the pole where the sun doesn’t set for weeks in the summer, and in the winter they have weeks without sun. Other places are less extreme, but have variances of a few hours from summer to winter (eg. here in Chicago in the US, we may have sunset as early as 4:30pm in December and as late as 9pm in June).
In addition to distance from equator, time zones matter… how big the time zone is, how far you are from a dividing line. If you’re at the far Eastern part of the time zone, the sunset would come sooner for you than those in the Western part of the time zone.
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