What is the difference between solar noon and clock noon

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Local Time. Heliodon Gallery Home. Local time is considered to be the time under consideration at the proposed building site. Many researchers favor using military time as a way of marking the track of the sun during the day.

Using this notation, at the vernal equinox on March 21, and the autumnal equinox on Sept. It is also very important to note that there is another time correction that must be considered. In the interest of convenience, the agreed upon "local time" of a given site is influenced by time zone, daylight savings time and other man-made decisions and demarcations.

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. Of course, if you happen to live in a location whose solar time is used as the basis for civil time in your time zone, solar noon will happen at or around 12 o'clock for you.

But even that is only true during some parts of the year. The Earth's rotation and its movements in relation to the Sun are not quite constant, so the length of a solar day, which is the time span from one solar noon to the next, varies during the course of a year. This phenomenon is referred to as the equation of time. 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.