this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Shouldn't the moon have… 24 time zones as well, depending where on the moon you currently are?
No, the moon's rotation isn't on a 24-hour cycle. I'm not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it's tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I'm not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I'm pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).
Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.
It's pretty simple, actually. The time zones are on average 1 hour apart. So there should be about 24*28=672 time zones on the Moon. SIMPLE.
The relativistic effects would be so small in human terms that the clock could just be synchronized with Earth time once daily and nobody would ever notice.