The Same Light

Bangor, Maine and Indianapolis get the same amount of daylight in a year — about 4,450 hours each. Indianapolis gets 59% more of it after 5 pm.

Both cities are on Eastern time. Here’s a harder one: Boston or Detroit — who gets more evening light?

This is one city’s year of daylight — every day from January to December, sunrise to sunset.

Now a second city. Same total area — the band is the same height overall. But the shape is different, and it sits at a different place on the clock.

Shade everything after 5 pm. That’s your evening light. Indianapolis: 910 hours. Bangor: 572.

They’re on the same clock, but Indianapolis sits at the western edge of Eastern time. The sun runs behind the clock there — later sunrises, later sunsets.

And Bangor is five degrees further north. Same total light, but a bigger swing — longer summers, shorter winters. In December, both forces stack.

December 9. Bangor: sunset at 3:53 pm. Indianapolis: 5:19 pm. An hour and a half apart. Same time zone.

What if we changed the clocks? Same city, three rules. The band slides — but the total never changes.

Here’s the whole country. Evening light by county — striped by time-zone lines. Arizona, as always, opts out.

The light never went anywhere. The Earth tilted it across the year. We drew lines on a map and called it time.