- There are no large scale records of sunrise and sunset across the world.
That really is staggering. Almost beyond belief, however it sounds very much like lawyer speak. I wonder if Tom is a lawyer (or wanna be lawyer) who uses these threads to practice absurd defence strategies? Just a thought.
I have worked on ships for 33 years, of which at least 2/3 of which has been spent on board, all over the world as a navigator.
We rely upon the calculated times of sunrise and sunset, we rely on the almanacs for accuracy for position fixing.
In the 22 years of being on board a ship, not ONCE has the predicted time of sunset or sunrise, meridianal passage (noon) Ever been in question, or differed from the tabulated values, or the calculated time.
Sunset is pretty easy to calculate if you know your latitude, which has been obtainable for hundreds of years before that from Polaris (you do accept that Polaris is almost above the North Pole i take it?), and tables.
You dont even really need your longitude as you can OBSERVE and MEASURE time of meridianol passage (i.e. when the sun is at its highest, bearing north or south, which also can be used to calculate latitude) then you can use this to determine the time that sun sets, and rises.
This in fact was how towns and cities around the UK determined noon, and therefore local time, before the invention of the telegraph, and it was the introduction of the railways that brought forward the requirement to standardise time, as the safety of trains would be a nightmare if each city used its own time.
An example of this is Bristol, UK, who had local time about 10 minutes after London. It needed standardising and hence was born GMT.
However this is still relevant to the topic, as it shows how meridian all passage was used to determine local time, and that is used to determine sunset.
At places of the same lattitude sunset occurs at the same LOCAL time each day, the differences in the same time zones are the differences of geographical locations within the same time zone.
Using the example above, London (Greenwich actually) is at 0 degrees, and Bristol is at 2 degrees 35 minutes west, and whilst there should not be any arguments that the sun goes round the earth (either flat or global) prescribing 360 degrees in about 24 hours, (lets not get too pedantic about fractions of a second here) then it takes about 4 minutes to pass 1 degree, so the GMT time of sunset will be 10 mins and 20 seconds after London, however if you are using LOCAL time, as determined by the mer pass of the sun it will be at the same time as London.
That means if the time of sunset at London is 18:00 GMT the time of sunset in Bristol will be 18:10.33GMT, but will be 18:00 LT if Bristol is keeping local time.
The fact that it has worked for centuries means that the time of sunset and sunrise has been observed, and recorded in cities for hundreds of years. In fact nearly all newspapers carried times of sunset and sunrise in times gone by. These were observed, and carried forwards, so there are records. The only part you wont like is YOU need to go and find the historical records.
You made the claim they were not recorded. I have given you the proof that they were, you need to counter this other than say “no they were not!”