World 1 · Day, Night & Shadows · 6 minA spinning Earth
Why the Sun rises and sets
Teaching this? Open projector mode
The Sun does not go round the Earth each day. Earth spins, once a day, around an axis through the North and South Poles. At any moment the half of Earth facing the Sun has day and the other half has night.
The line between them is the terminator. As Earth turns, your town is carried across it: into daylight at sunrise, out of it at sunset. From the ground it looks as if the Sun moves across the sky from east to west.
Check yourself
Why does the Sun seem to cross the sky from east to west?
Check yourself
When it is noon where you are, what time is it roughly on the opposite side of Earth?
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