Let me orient you on the layout, because that's the real skill here — Page 444, Lesson 410

I want to walk you through what this page actually is, because at first glance it looks like a wall of numbers. This is a Sunset Table — a standard piece of the almanac data you'll find in the General Navigation syllabus. It gives you the local mean time of sunset for a range of latitudes, day by day through the year. Let me orient you on the layout, because that's the real skill here. The table is divided by latitude bands down the left-hand side, from N 72° at the top, all the way down through the equator at 0°, and then into the southern hemisphere to S 60° at the bottom. Each row is a fixed latitude, and each column is a date. Look at the column headers. The main block runs February, March, April — and within each month you've got a series of day numbers: 16, 19, 22, 25, 28, then 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, then 2. So the table isn't just one month — it's a continuous run of dates across the late winter and spring. Each cell holds a time in hours and minutes, written as two numbers — for example, at N 72° on the 16th of February you read 15 h 39 m. Now, the key thing I want you to notice is the trend in the times as latitude changes. Look at the far north. At N 72° in mid-February, sunset is around 15:39. By the end of March it's pushed out to about 19:17. That's a huge swing — nearly four hours — because at high latitude the days lengthen very rapidly in spring. Drop down to N 60°. Mid-February gives you about 16:52, and by late March you're near 18:45. Still a big change, but smaller than at 72°. At N 50°, February gives roughly 17:19, and late March is about 18:33. The swing keeps shrinking as you head toward the equator. Now look at the equator itself, 0°. The times barely move — around 18:09 to 18:14 throughout the whole period. That's the classic equatorial signature: day length is essentially constant all year, so sunset stays pinned near 18:00 local mean time. Cross into the southern hemisphere, and the trend inverts. At S 30°, mid-February sunset is late — about 18:47 — and it gets earlier as you move into March and April, dropping to around 18:00 by late March. At S 60°, February gives you about 19:50, and by late March it's down near 17:36. So in the south, the days are shortening through this period, and the effect is strongest at the highest southern latitude. There's one more structural detail I want you to see. The table is split into two halves — the northern latitudes from N 72° down to N 10°, and then the southern latitudes from S 10° down to S 60°. And notice the 0° row sits between them, with the nearly constant times. That's your reference line. Also, watch the column structure carefully. The header row shows the months — February, March, April — and under each month a sequence of day numbers. But the table is printed in a staggered format: the day columns don't line up perfectly across the page because of the way the data is typeset. When you actually use this table in an exam or in flight planning, you read across the row for your latitude and down the column for your date, and the intersection gives you the local mean time of sunset. One more practical point. The times are local mean time, not UTC and not zone time. That matters operationally — if you need sunset in UTC for a flight plan, you'll have to apply the longitude correction to convert from local mean time. But that conversion is a separate procedure; this table just hands you the raw local mean time of sunset for your latitude and date. So, to summarise the pattern you should carry away: high northern latitudes have the biggest daily change in sunset time in spring; the equator barely changes; and southern latitudes show sunset getting earlier through this same period. That's the whole story this page is telling you.