What you're looking at is a sunrise and sunset table — Page 453, Lesson 442

This is the start of a new topic — the Time chapter's data tables. Let me walk you through what this page actually is, because at first glance it looks like a wall of numbers, but it's one of the most practical tools you'll use in navigation. What you're looking at is a sunrise and sunset table. Specifically, this is a table that gives you the times of sunrise and sunset for a range of latitudes, day by day, across the months of October and November. The whole page is built around one idea: the time the sun rises and sets changes with two things — your latitude and the date. Let me teach you how to read the structure, because once you can read this table, you can extract the exact time of sunrise or sunset for any position on the globe within the latitudes shown. First, the latitude column. Look down the left-hand side. You'll see labels like N72, N70, N68, N66, N64, N62, N60, N58, N56, N54, N52, N50, N20, N10, then 0, then S10, S20, S30. The "N" means North latitude, the "S" means South latitude, and the "0" is the Equator. So this table covers from 72 degrees North all the way down to 30 degrees South. Notice the latitudes aren't evenly spaced — they're denser in the high northern latitudes, which is where the sunrise and sunset times change fastest. Now the date columns. Across the top you'll see the months October and November, and under each month a row of numbers: 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29 for October, and 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19 for November. These are the days of the month. So the table gives you sunrise and sunset times every three days or so, not every single day — you interpolate between them if you need an exact date. Here's the key part: each cell in the table contains two times, an hours value and a minutes value, shown as "h" and "m". The first time in each cell is the sunrise, and the second is the sunset. Let me show you with a concrete example. Take the row for N60, 60 degrees North. On October 2nd, the entry reads 06 07 for sunrise and 06 14 for sunset. Wait — let me re-read that. Actually, look carefully: the N60 row starts "06 07 06 14 06 21 06 28 06 36 06 43 06 50 06 58 07 06 07 13 07 21 07 29 07 36 07 44 07 52". So on October 2nd at 60 North, sunrise is at 06:07 and sunset is at 06:14? That can't be right — the sun would only be up for seven minutes. Let me look again. Actually, I need to correct myself. Look at the N60 row more carefully. The first entry is 06 07, then 06 14, then 06 21, then 06 28 — these are all increasing. These are sunrise times only for successive dates. October 2nd sunrise is 06:07, October 5th is 06:14, October 8th is 06:21, and so on. The sunset times are in a separate part of the table that continues after the sunrise values. So each row lists sunrise times across the dates, then sunset times across the dates. Let me give you a cleaner example. Look at the N50 row, 50 degrees North. It reads "06 01 06 05 06 10 06 15 06 19 06 24 06 29 06 34 06 39 06 44 06 49 06 54 06 59 07 04 07 09". So on October 2nd at 50 North, sunrise is at 06:01. On October 5th, 06:05. On October 8th, 06:10. You can see the sun is rising later and later as October progresses — that's the northern hemisphere heading into winter. Now here's the critical professional point, and this is why this table matters in navigation. Look at the high northern latitudes. At N72, 72 degrees North, the October 2nd entry reads "06 21 06 35 06 49 07 03 07 17 07 32 07 47 08 03 08 19 08 36 08 54 09 13 09 34 09 58 10 27". Sunrise on October 2nd is 06:21, but by October 29th it's 10:27 — the sun is rising over four hours later in less than a month. And look at the end of that row: "11 14 -". That dash is the key. At 72 North in early November, the sun does not rise at all — this is the polar night, when the sun stays below the horizon for the entire day. That dash is not an error; it means no sunrise occurs. Now compare that to the equator, the 0 row. It reads "46 45 44 44 43 42 42 41 41 40 40 40 40 40 41 41 42". These are minutes only — at the equator, sunrise is essentially constant, around 05:40 to 05:46 throughout October and November. The sun rises and sets at nearly the same time every day, because the equator has no significant seasonal variation in day length. And look at the southern latitudes. At S30, 30 degrees South, the entry reads "05 38 15 34 05 31 05 27 05 24 05 20 05 17 05 14 05 11 05 08 05 0". Here the sun is rising earlier as October progresses — 05:38 on October 2nd, down to 05:08 later in the month. That's the southern hemisphere heading into summer, so days are getting longer and sunrise comes earlier. So the pattern to hold onto: in the northern hemisphere, sunrise gets later and days shorten through October and November; in the southern hemisphere, sunrise gets earlier and days lengthen; at the equator, it barely changes; and at very high northern latitudes, the sun stops rising altogether. Why does this matter for you as a pilot? Because sunrise and sunset times determine when you're operating in daylight versus night, and that affects your flight planning — whether you need night flying equipment, how you plan your fuel, and how you interpret visibility conditions. This table is the reference you'd use to determine, for a given latitude and date, exactly when daylight begins and ends. One more structural note: the times in this table are in UTC — Universal Time Coordinated — or possibly local standard time depending on the chart's convention, but for navigation purposes you'd apply your longitude correction to convert to your local time. The table gives you the raw sunrise and sunset times; you do the conversion. So when you use this table, you enter with two values — your latitude and the date — and you read out the sunrise time and the sunset time for that position. That's the entire function of this page.