For Other Uses, See .: Day (Disambiguation)
For Other Uses, See .: Day (Disambiguation)
For Other Uses, See .: Day (Disambiguation)
10,000
or
1
100,000
) of an
astronomic day the base unit of time. This was an afterglow ofdecimal time and calendar, which had
been given up already for its difficulty to comply with familiar units. The still most successful
candidate is the centiday = 14.4 minutes, as a shorter quarter of an hour and also close to the SI
target kilosecond and old Chinese ke.
Astronomy[edit]
A day of exactly 86,400 SI seconds is the astronomical unit of time (the second is not preferred in
astronomy).
[6]
For a given planet, there are three types of day defined in astronomy:
stellar day - an entire rotation of a planet with respect to the distant stars
sidereal day - a single rotation of a planet with respect to the vernal equinox
mean solar day - average time of a single rotation of a planet with respect to the sun as the
central star
For Earth, the stellar day and the sidereal day are nearly of the same length and about 3 minutes 56
seconds shorter than the solar day. Relative to the fixed stars, the Earth spins just over 366 times
upon its axis during one complete orbit. The Earth's orbit around the Sun reduces (by one) the
number of transits the Sun makes across the Earth's sky in a sidereal year.
Colloquial[edit]
The word refers to various relatedly defined ideas, including the following:
24 hours (exactly)
the period of light when the Sun is above the local horizon (that is, the time period
from sunrise to sunset);
the full day covering a dark and a light period, beginning from the beginning of the dark period or
from a point near the middle of the dark period;
a full dark and light period, sometimes called a nychthemeron in English, from the Greek
for night-day;
the time period from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM or 9:00 PM or some other fixed clock period
overlapping or set off from other time periods such as "morning", "evening", or "night".
Civil day[edit]
For civil purposes a common clock time has been defined for an entire region based on the mean
local solar time at some central meridian. Such time zones began to be adopted about the middle of
the 19th century when railroads with regular schedules came into use, with most major countries
having adopted them by 1929. For the whole world, 40 such time zones are now in use. The main
one is "world time" or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
The present common convention has the civil day starting at midnight, which is near the time of the
lower culmination of the mean Sun on the central meridian of the time zone. A day is commonly
divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds each.
Leap seconds[edit]
To keep the civil day aligned with the apparent movement of the Sun, positive or negative leap
seconds may be inserted.
A civil clock day is typically 86,400 SI seconds long, but will be 86,401 s or 86,399 s long in the
event of a leap second.
Leap seconds are announced in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference
Systems Service which measures the Earth's rotation and determines whether a leap second is
necessary. Leap seconds occur only at the end of a UTC month, and have only ever been inserted
at the end of June 30 or December 31.
Boundaries of the day[edit]
Sun and Moon, Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
For most diurnal animals, the day naturally begins at dawn and ends at sunset. Humans, with our
cultural norms and scientific knowledge, have employed several different conceptions of the day's
boundaries. The Jewish day begins at either sunset or at nightfall (when three second-
magnitude stars appear). Medieval Europe followed this tradition, known as Florentine reckoning: in
this system, a reference like "two hours into the day" meant two hours after sunset and thus times
during the evening need to be shifted back one calendar day in modern reckoning. Days such
as Christmas Eve, Halloween, and the Eve of Saint Agnesare the remnants of the older pattern
when holidays began the evening before. Present common convention is for the civil day to begin at
midnight, that is 00:00 (inclusive), and last a full 24 hours until 24:00 (exclusive).
In ancient Egypt, the day was reckoned from sunrise to sunrise. Muslims fast from daybreak to
sunset each day of the month ofRamadan. The "Damascus Document", copies of which were also
found among the Dead Sea scrolls, states regarding Sabbathobservance that "No one is to do any
work on Friday from the moment that the sun's disk stands distant from the horizon by the length of
its own diameter," presumably indicating that the monastic community responsible for producing this
work counted the day as ending shortly before the sun had begun to set.
In many cultures, nights are named after the previous day. For example,"Friday night" usually means
the entire night between Friday and Saturday. This difference from the civil day often leads to
confusion. Events starting at midnight are often announced as occurring the day before. TV-guides
tend to list nightly programs at the previous day, although programming a VCR requires the strict
logic of starting the new day at 00:00 (to further confuse the issue, VCRs set to the 12-hour clock
notation will label this "12:00 AM"). Expressions like "today", "yesterday" and "tomorrow" become
ambiguous during the night.
Validity of tickets, passes, etc., for a day or a number of days may end at midnight, or closing time,
when that is earlier. However, if a service (e.g. public transport) operates from for example, 6:00 to
1:00 the next day (which may be noted as 25:00), the last hour may well count as being part of the
previous day (also for the arrangement of the timetable). For services depending on the day ("closed
on Sundays", "does not run on Fridays", and so on) there is a risk of ambiguity. As an example, for
the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways), a day ticket is valid 28 hours, from 0:00 to 28:00
(that is, 4:00 the next day). To give another example, the validity of a pass on London Regional
Transport services is until the end of the "transport day"that is to say, until 4:30 am on the day
after the "expiry" date stamped on the pass.
24 hours vs daytime[edit]
To distinguish between a full day and daytime, the word nychthemeron (from Greek for a night and a
day) may be used in English for the former, or more colloquially the term 24 hours. In other
languages, the latter is also often used. Other languages also have a separate word for a full day,
such as vuorokausi in Finnish, pevin Estonian, dygn in Swedish, dgn in Danish, dgn in
Norwegian, slarhringur in Icelandic, etmaal in Dutch, doba in Polish, (sutki) in
Russian, (sutki) in Belarusian,