Twice a year, the sun doesn’t play favorites. Everyone on Earth is seemingly on equal status – at least when it comes to the amount of light and dark that they get. On Sunday, we enter our second and final equinox of 2024.
If you reside in the Northern Hemisphere, you know it as the fall equinox (or autumnal equinox) . For people south of the equator, this equinox actually heralds the coming of spring . Technically, your location on the globe also determines the local time and even the date you experience the fall equinox.
The vast bulk of the world’s population will mark it this year on Sunday, Sept. 22. The sun rises directly east over the US Capitol dome just a few days before the 2022 fall equinox.
People close to the equator won’t notice anything – they have roughly 12-hour days and 12-hour nights all year long. But hardy folks close to the poles, in places such as Alaska and the northern parts of Canada and Scandinavia, go through wild swings in the day/night ratio each year. They have long, dark winters and then have a summer solstice where night barely intrudes.
But during the equinox, everyone from pole to pole gets to enjoy a 12/12 split of day and night. Well, there’s just one rub – it isn’t as perfectly “equal” as you might have thought. There’s a good explanation for why you don’t get precisely 12 hours of daylight on the equinox.
More on that farther down. Here are the answers to some fall equinox questions: From the CNN Fast Facts file :.