When is solar noon today

It is slightly different for every day of the year. Our unique Solar Noon Calculator will provide you with a table showing the exact time of solar noon for your location for each day of the year. If you prefer, you can print out the values of the Equation of Time, which gives you the difference between solar time and clock time for each day of the year. Clocks have changed our world more significantly than wheels.

Our society now relies heavily on the precise reckoning of hours, minutes, and seconds. The inclination of the Earth with respect to the main plane of the Solar System along with the slight ellipticity of the Earth's orbit conspire to render the Sun's daily culmination its maximum height above the horizon , or Solar Noon, to seldom correspond exactly with the noon reckoned on our clocks and watches.

This fact alone allows us to ponder the remarkable chain of astronomical discoveries, the bold confidence of our ancestors, who chose to risk years-long sea voyages, along with the utter commonplace nature and astonishing accuracy of our watches, clocks, and calendars.

Since solar time depends on the longitude, solar noon occurs at exactly the same moment in all locations that share your local meridian. In most places on Earth, solar noon does not happen at 12 o'clock. The Earth's rotation slowly shifts the meridian experiencing solar noon from east to west.

In other words, solar noon happens a little earlier in locations just east of you and a little later in locations west of you. Since our clocks are set according to time zones , civil time changes abruptly as you move from one time zone to another, usually in 1-hour increments. While this undeniably makes life easier for us , it does not reflect the even movement of the Earth's rotation and the gradual geographical progression of local solar time.

This means that clocks in the eastern part of each time zone show an earlier time at solar noon than clocks near its western border. Even if time zones were used the way they were once envisioned—where local time is based on the solar time in the zone's center, with the time zone extending 7.

In real life, this difference is even larger because time zones rarely follow this ideal. Their borders are often grossly distorted by political or geographical factors. For example, China spans more than 60 degrees of longitude but the country follows a single time zone.

This means that solar noon in western areas occurs later than pm during some parts of the year, later than anywhere else on Earth.