The whole "6am sunrise and 6pm sunset every day of the year" thing at the equator is kind of mind blowing.
Another maybe counterintuitive fact is that (to a reasonable approximation) everywhere on earth gets the same number of hours of daylight over the course of a year.
Funny because growing up in the tropics I thought sunset and sunrise were synonymous with those times of the day, and learning people in other parts of the world experienced shrinking/lengthening day/night cycles was mind blowing. You mean it's 8PM in the night but the sun's still in the sky?
I was at a wedding in Sweden near midsummer with a lot of international guests. They were quite surprised to get out of the reception dinner at 10pm and see that the sun was still up. We were below the arctic circle, so no midnight sun, but it doesn't really get dark during the night, you get an hour or two of twilight, and then the sun rises at 2am again.
I travelled to Stockholm from North America a few decades ago, right around midummer. Worst jetlag of my life.
The problem was that 20 hours of daylight, especially having 2:30 AM feel like 6:30AM. It was impossible to get an adequate amount of sleep. The paper thin curtains in the cheap hotel where I stayed did nothing to block out the light.
If I am ever in that part of the world at that time of year again, I will be bringing a sleep mask and seeking out a hotel with proper blackout blinds or curtains.
You can just bring or buy some pop-up travel blackout blinds made for babies. We used those with great effect when visiting my parents' summer house in Northern Norway in the summers when the kids were young.
Bonus, they now work as great blackouts in my home office for video calls when I do not want sunshine and clouds to change my green-screen effects etc.
I would have thought that for places that close to the arctic circle would be a national crime to not have full black out curtains. The difference being the punishment based on what nation the crime was committed.
I live in the south of England and experienced this in Scotland. I was trying to get somewhere to pitch my tent but rapidly running out of light, or so I thought. It was the height of summer and it just never really got dark. Maybe England isn't as different as I think it is, but it was strange to find my assumption that night=dark was quite wrong.
> The whole "6am sunrise and 6pm sunset every day of the year" thing at the equator is kind of mind blowing.
You can take this further. Look at weather and seasons. Here's Nairobi's yearly averages[0]. You can see that both temperature and precipitation are fairly consistent. On the other side of the continent Libreville[1] has a bit more precipitation variance but still low temperature variance. Let's got to South America with Macapa[2] and Quito[3] and let's keep going and land in Kuching[4].
Essentially in these regions, there are no real seasons. At least in the sense that many think of them. Things do change, but winter isn't that different than summer.
I know there are variances, but the scale masks a bit of what's going on. So let's look at London[5], Osaka[6], Auckland[7], Los Angeles[8] (often joked at for having no weather), Seattle[9], and Oslo[10]. As you can see, these are extremely different situations. It even has large effects on how people think about weather, time, and other things.
It's funny how what is so obvious and normal to some are completely different to others. Sometimes seeming as if we live in different worlds. In some sense, we do, and I think we often forget that.
There is the same number of hours of daylight, but near the poles you sleep through a lot of those hours in summer. So you experience far fewer hours of daylight.
Another mind blowing thing about the equatorial sun is seeing it above you! Where I grew up, the sun is never higher that 30 degrees.
I lived in East Africa for a while and you’d get kick out of the way time is referred to in Swahili, “midnight” is 6am, and the first hour of the day 7am etc. makes a ton of sense when sunrise is around the same time each day!
Yes, though a location at 45 degrees N/S only gets 70.7% as much sun power per area due to not being perpendicular to the sun's light, and even less on the ground due to extra atmosphere to pass through.
Appropriately enough, that "everywhere on earth gets the same number of hours of daylight" fact came from a solar system salesperson, who didn't go out of his way to emphasize the atmospheric effects here at ~49°N.
The silver lining is that our longest days are often our sunniest.
> Another maybe counterintuitive fact is that (to a reasonable approximation) everywhere on earth gets the same number of hours of daylight over the course of a year.
Not the same amount of usable daylight though as the amount you have to waste to get a decent amount of sleep all year around varies by latitiude.
Living at the equator most of my life, it's actually funny how schedules are messed up when the sunrise is half an hour earlier or later. Traffic becomes chaotic because some people insist on getting home before sundown, or things like people becoming uneasy that the school starts before sunrise.
Weather is fun too, because it changes by +/- 3 degrees throughout the year. The heat makes my bedroom door expand. We had an argument with the housing developers because we had custom doors that didn't fit. But turns out it was passing all the tests when they ran it, and not in hotter periods of the year.
When we were in Hawaii I think the only reason we caught the sunset is because we were less than 400 yards from a beach. By the time you know the sun is going down you are about to be in the dark.
Movies about vampires in the Arctic Circle are fun but vampires at the equator would be more terrifying for the humans at dusk and for the vampires at dawn.
Another maybe counterintuitive fact is that (to a reasonable approximation) everywhere on earth gets the same number of hours of daylight over the course of a year.