Solar Time vs Clock Time
Official time zones are political; the sun is not. This map draws the real time zone borders over the 24 ideal 15°-wide sun bands and lets you click anywhere to compare the local solar time — noon when the sun is actually highest — with the clock time of the zone actually used there. The gap is often startling: western Spain runs more than 90 minutes ahead of the sun, and the far west of China more than three hours. The tool also shows the equation of time, the small seasonal wobble that shifts true solar noon by up to ±16 minutes over the year, and includes presets for the world’s most extreme clock-vs-sun offsets.
Runs 100% in your browser — your files never leave your device.
Read the full guide to this tool
Notes
- Solar time depends only on longitude: the sun crosses 15° of longitude per hour, so every degree west of your zone’s reference meridian puts your clock 4 minutes ahead of the sun.
- Daylight saving time adds a further hour on top of whatever offset politics already chose — that is why summer solar noon lands near 14:00 in parts of western Europe.
- The equation of time comes from the Earth’s elliptical orbit and axial tilt; it is why sundials and clocks disagree even at the reference meridian.
- Zone borders come from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset (standard time, simplified for the web); tiny enclaves may be missing and DST is not applied automatically.
- Runs 100% in your browser — your files and data never leave your device.
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