hi there, sylvie, great question! at first, I was leaning toward answering that the further one goes from the tropics, the fewer minutes per year of daylight one will experience, but this proved false. in their summer each polar region stays in sunlight 24 hours per day during the period near solstice (and conversely, in darkness during the winter.) if you look at an analemma (when centered on the equator) you will see that it is symmetrical, and visually represents the balance we are wondering about, the average amount of daylight hours for a given location on the earth's surface (disregarding, of course, topographical and other obstacles! it is important to remember the earth is far from being a perfect sphere.) I came to the conclusion that yes, for any given location on the earth's surface, the average hours of sunlight or daylight annualy would be "roughly" the same. just to be on the safe side, I called a retired physicist I know (the directory of the society's observatory;) even he seemed stumped for a few minutes, but he told me that he believed my analysis to be correct. I will forward this question to my greatest resource in these matters, the seesat-L emailing-list. cheers! -stephan >Hey Stephan, > >I have a question for you and I think you are probably the only person >that I know who can answer it. > >Last night I was talking to a friend and we were wondering whether the >average amount of daylight hours that any given location on the earth >gets over the course of the year would be the same. > >Any thoughts? > >Hope all is well, >Sylvie ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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