Where you are in terms of time zones can make a big difference. I travel out to Ohio in the summer and notice how much longer the daylight lasts out there, compared to Mass.
And there are the times when you can see the difference
being far to the south can be, like on those winter days when you're in New England and it's dark at 4 pm but when you
see a football game in Miami, much further to the west as well as the south, you see it's still daylight out there.
The folks from there are truly downeast! Beautiful, but stark. Wonder what's up with the time zone in Nova Scotia. V's wife.
Online sunrise, sunset, daylight length calculator:
http://www.almanac.com/rise/
>>but when you
see a football game in Miami
and I mean on the TV of course :)
The Western Aleutians are on the other side of the 180 meridian and by rights ought to be 12 hours ahead of Greenwich. By convention, they set their clocks one hour behind Anchorage, though they rightly should be two hours behind. Anchorage, in turn, is only one hour behind Seattle, though, by rights, they should be two. The upshot is that during the Summer, clocks in the Western Aleutians run three hours ahead of the Sun. Since some flat windy islands are on the western edge of their "natural" time zones the clocks are actually something like 3:20 ahead of the sun.
Since folks tend to work long shifts out there, five to five is typical. (First shift five am to five pm, second, pm to am). In late summer you have the surreal experience of walking to the chow hall at 4:30 for breakfast in stark darkness, being greeted by Orion burning brightly in the southwestern sky. The equivalent time in New England, based on the position of the stars would be about 2:10 in the morning, including the effects of DLST.