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Earth's rotation relative to the Sun causes the 24-hour day/night cycle. A diurnal cycle (or diel cycle) is any pattern that recurs every 24 hours as a result of one full rotation of the planet Earth around its axis. [1] Earth's rotation causes surface temperature fluctuations throughout the day and night, as well as weather changes throughout ...
A circadian rhythm (/ s ər ˈ k eɪ d i ə n /), or circadian cycle, is a natural oscillation that repeats roughly every 24 hours.Circadian rhythms can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to the environment (is entrained by the environment).
Besides the day of 24 hours (86,400 seconds), the word day is used for several different spans of time based on the rotation of the Earth around its axis. An important one is the solar day, the time it takes for the Sun to return to its culmination point (its highest point in the sky). Due to an orbit's eccentricity, the Sun resides in one of ...
Systematically observing the sunrise, people discovered that it occurs between two extreme locations at the horizon and eventually noted the midpoint between the two. Later it was realized that this happens on a day when the duration of the day and the night are practically equal and the word "equinox" comes from Latin aequus, meaning "equal", and nox, meaning "night".
The lunar day is longer than the Earth day because the Moon orbits in the same direction the Earth spins. The Moon orbits the Earth in the same direction as the Earth rotates on its axis, so it takes slightly more than a day—about 24 hours and 50 minutes—for the Moon to return to the same location in the sky.
Daytime or day as observed on Earth is the period of the day during which a given location experiences natural illumination from direct sunlight. Daytime occurs when the Sun appears above the local horizon , that is, anywhere on the globe's hemisphere facing the Sun.
Earth's rotation period relative to the Sun—its mean solar day—is 86,400 seconds of mean solar time (86,400.0025 SI seconds). [157] Because Earth's solar day is now slightly longer than it was during the 19th century due to tidal deceleration, each day varies between 0 and 2 ms longer than the mean solar day. [158] [159]
Near the equinoxes in Chicago the sunsets occur in the middle of east-west streets (an event known as Chicagohenge), creating intriguing golden hour photography opportunities like this diffraction spike in an urban canyon. Similar phenomenon (such as Manhattanhenge) occur in other parts of the world at various times of the year.