I am trying to explain a phenomenon I noticed while on vacation recently - namely, why the sunrise times for two cities in the same time zone are nearly the same, but the sunset times are almost an hour apart.
I live in New York and I vacationed in Charleston, South Carolina. On December 31, I noted the following sunrise and sunset times:
| city | lat | lon | sunrise | sunset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nyc | 40.7127 | -74.0059 | 7:19 AM | 4:37 PM |
| chs | 32.783333 | -79.933333 | 7:21 AM | 5:22 PM |
One explanation for Charleston's late sunset time would be that it is located west of NYC, but in the same time zone. In that case we would expect the sun to set a little later. But by the same logic, we should expect the sun to rise a little later as well. The sun does indeed rise later in CHS but the difference is not as large as the sunset times.
Additionally it's my understanding that cities closer to the equator have "longer days". But it's not intuitive to me as to why the length of the day should be "added" to the end of the day, rather than distributed across the entire day.