Red gateway, doubled daytime, troubled clocktime

Red Mars is passing red Aldebaran, and the Moon will sweep between the two on Friday March 19.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

The conjunctions of the Moon with Mars on the right and Aldebaran on the left are just about simultaneous,  on March 19 at 20 by Universal Time – 4 or more hours earlier by American clocks which are now on Daylight Shifted Time.

In other words, the three are in a straight line; 5.1° from Aldebaran to the Moon and 1.9° from the Moon to Mars – though that’s as seen from the center of the Earth; from our northern latitudes, the Moon is parallax-displaced somewhat south, toward Aldebaran.

And, because of the timing, America doesn’t quite get to see the straight line-up.  On March 18 the Moon will be considerably short of reaching it, and on the evening of March 19 will be just past it.

Daytime twice nighttime

It struck me that, in the page about Sunday’s clock shifting, the graph of sunrise and sunset times makes it obvious that daytime can swell in summer to be twice as long as night.  The length of daytime is equal to that of night at the equinoxes, and nearly equal all year at the equator, and by contrast at the poles it varies from 0 hours to 24.  I wondered at what latitude it reaches a maximum of 16 hours, wrote a small program, and the answer is 47.7°, which is nearly at the “49th parallel dividing the US and Canada.

It happens, of course, on the day of the summer solstice, and presumably at the other solstice night is twice the length of day, but I haven’t spent more time finding that with the program, which is sort of brute-force, calculating for days and latitudes.  There must be a neater way of finding the answers from the Earth’s obliquity of 23.45°.

Daylight-shifting twice as long

Thanks to those who suggested I should weigh in quickly, it at all, on the “Sunshine Protection Act” of US senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio, which would stretch “daylight saving time” to the whole year.  So on March 14 I did, at the cost of some time learning how to put anchors into web pages and how to navigate senators’ web forms.  I put a comment into Wyden’s:

Clock-changing should be abolished, but by returning the whole year to sun time as it was before clock-changing was invented – NOT to the false time by which 12 noon is called 11.  See a compact statement of this at https://www.universalworkshop.com/clock-shifting-times/#making-it-even-worse

And I sent a letter to The Oregonian:

It’s good that Senator Wyden’s bill (“Permanent daylight saving time bill returns to U.S. Senate”, The Oregonian, March 9) would get rid of the twice-yearly ordeal of clock changing.  But the whole year should return to standard time, which is roughly the same as natural sun time – NOT to “daylight saving time”.
This perversion, invented in 1895, is merely “daylight displacement time”.  It compels us to call 8 o’clock 7, 12 noon 11, and so on.  Noon is when the sun is highest, and all time-keeping throughout history is based on that.  If we can’t grow up in this understanding of the relation between day, time, and sun, a veil falls between us and the natural world.
The shifted time is simply a falsehood.  And I can tell you that it’s a perpetually annoying complication in astronomical calculations!
To quote the “Making it Even Worse” section of my web page on clock-shifting:  “Almost every year, politicians propose that we cease the clock changing – but in precisely the wrong way!”

I tried to catch their attention with my Royal Astronomical Society credential, but the difficulty in using Wyden’s web form was choosing a “Topic” out of a dropdown list of about sixty, such as Agriculture and Veterans; none close to clocks or time.  “Bureaucracy” would fit.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing  it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.