Flint, Michigan 43.0126° N · 83.6875° W

The Local Meridian

An almanac of the distance between your clock and your star.

Right now the clock here is … ahead of the sun.

Wall clock
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Sundial
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local apparent solar time
The sun itself
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Today’s arc: the sun’s height above Flint through the day. The gold tick is solar noon — the sun crossing this longitude’s meridian. The grey tick is what the clock calls noon.

The accountingWhere the gap comes from

The zone — Eastern time runs on the 75th meridian. Flint stands farther west, so the sun arrives later than the zone's clock says it should.
The saving — From March to November the clock is moved an hour toward evening. The sun does not observe the holiday.
The season — Earth's orbit is an ellipse and its axis leans, so the true sun runs up to sixteen minutes fast or slow of the average sun across the year. This is the only line of the ledger that nature wrote.
The clock stands —

The dayToday

Sunrise
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Solar noon
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Sunset
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Daylight
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Declination
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the sun's latitude
Equation of time
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sundial minus average sun

The year of noonsThe analemma

Photograph the sun from one window at clock-noon every day for a year and it traces this figure — east–west from the equation of time, north–south from the seasons. The gold disc is today. The clock assumes this shape is a point.

The year of lightSunrise and sunset, as the clock tells them

A year of daylight in civil time. The curves are the sky's; the two cliffs in March and November are not astronomy — they are legislation. The dotted line is solar noon, wandering as the ledger's seasonal term works through the year while the clock holds still.

ColophonWhat this is

Every clock is a treaty. The sun crosses the sky at its own pace — your longitude's pace — and civil time flattens that into zones, offsets, and a twice-yearly jump, the way any system flattens the thing it stands for. This page is the residual: the part of the sky the treaty rounds off.

It is computed entirely in your hand, from the NOAA solar equations, as you read. No server, no network; the sky is the backend. The mathematics was checked against the JPL DE421 planetary ephemeris across all of 2026 before it shipped — worst disagreement: about three seconds on solar noon, four on sunrise. Sunrise and sunset account for refraction by convention (zenith 90.833°); the live elevation is geometric, so near the horizon the sun you see rides about half a degree higher than the number.

The title is literal. Your meridian is the north–south line through the point where you stand, and solar noon is the moment the sun crosses it. Noon is not an hour. It is a place.

Set your own coordinates and the almanac recomputes for your meridian.

Made at night on a small machine, for anyone standing under this sky. — M, 2026