At the Equator, the earth’s rotational motion is at its fastest, about a thousand miles an hour. If that motion suddenly stopped, the momentum would send things flying eastward. Moving rocks and oceans would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The still-moving atmosphere would scour landscapes.

The Earth orbits the sun once every 365 days and rotates about its axis once every 24 hours. Day and night are due to the Earth rotating on its axis, not its orbiting around the sun.

Earth’s Rotation: The Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the Sun and once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds with respect to the stars. What’s more, its central axis is aligned with two stars.

This situation for the Earth is not the condition of ‘stopped’ rotation, but it is as close as the laws of physics will let the Earth get. If it stopped spinning completely…not even once every 365 days, you would get 1/2 year daylight and 1/2 year nightime.

We get day and night because the Earth spins (or rotates) on an imaginary line called its axis and different parts of the planet are facing towards the Sun or away from it.

From Earth, the Sun looks like it moves across the sky in the daytime and appears to disappear at night. This is because the Earth is spinning towards the east. The Earth spins about its axis, an imaginary line that runs through the middle of the Earth between the North and South poles.

Looking toward the sun we thus see a brilliant white light while looking away we would see only the darkness of empty space. Since there is virtually nothing in space to scatter or re-radiate the light to our eye, we see no part of the light and the sky appears to be black.

Even though the Moon is much smaller than the Sun, because it is just the right distance away from Earth, the Moon can fully blocks the Sun’s light from Earth’s perspective. This completely blocks out the Sun’s light. However, the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun.

You cannot see the sun in the nighttime. But did you know that you can see the sun’s light at night? Here’s how it works. When it is dark, you see the moon shining in the sky.

Iceland

Norway

Antarctica has six months of daylight in its summer and six months of darkness in its winter. The seasons are caused by the tilt of Earth’s axis in relation to the sun. The direction of the tilt never changes. But as the Earth orbits the sun, different parts of the planet are exposed to direct sunlight.

Time and daylight in Sweden From between end May and mid-July, the midnight sun lights up the night in northern Sweden lengthening your sightseeing days. Sweden is a country with big differences in daylight. In the far north, the sun does not set at all in June and there is darkness around the clock in January.

The shortest day of the year lasts 7 hours 49 minutes and 42 seconds. The length of day during this time is 8 hours, 48 minutes and 38 seconds shorter than the summer solstice. The actual moment of the solstice in 2020 will occur around 10.02am in the UK, but most people focus on the entire day.

The occurrence takes place each winter because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis. “This tilt makes it so that none of the Sun’s disc are visible above the horizon,” according to Chinchar. But that doesn’t mean the town will be completely dark.

Alaska does not limit or tax alcoholic beverages brought into this state for personal use and not for resale. Over 75 Alaska communities have, by local option, banned the importation or possession of alcoholic beverages. It may be a felony crime to ship alcoholic beverages to those communities.

Dece

Alaska receives more sunlight in spring and summer than any other state and many other parts of the world. Does your home area have midnight sun? In Barrow, the state’s northernmost community, the sun does not set for more than two and a half months—from May 10 until August 2.

Utqiagvik

Averaged over an entire year, Alaska gets 10-17 minutes more daylight per day than the rest of the country.

That said, Alaska still gets fairly extreme. For example, Barrow—one of the northernmost towns in Alaska—has about two months of darkness in the winter, from about November 18 to January 22. But in the summer, the sun doesn’t completely set for about 82 days, from roughly May 11 until July 31.

For those two hours between sunrise and sunset, it’s basically dusk or dawn because it never actually gets dark. This all-day daylight occurs from May 17 through July 27 in Fairbanks.

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The Best Time to Visit Alaska

• Peak season is June to August. By mid-June, it’s as warm as it’s going to get.
• Cruise Season is also May through September.
• Shoulder Season is May (early season) and September (late season), with 10-25% discounts on some hotels, tours, and cruises.