ORLANDO, Fla. – It’s one of the most heated debates of the year. Should we mess with the clock?
Saturday marks the last day of daylight saving time — geared to provide more daylight for the evening in the warmer months — and a return to standard time.
If we kept daylight saving time year-round, the sunrises and sunsets in the summer would go unchanged from what we are used to. Currently, with daylight saving time, Central Florida’s latest sunset in the summer is just before 8:30 p.m.
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The issue would occur in the morning. If we didn’t fall back in early November, the sun wouldn’t rise until after 8 a.m. during the middle of winter. We would have a little more daylight in the evening if we kept daylight saving time for the entire year.
On the flip side, if we observed standard time all year, a lot of your summer evening activities would fall in darkness. The sun would come up much earlier, though with the earliest sunrise being 5:27 a.m. in the middle of summer.
The latest sunset would only be 7:27 p.m.
The time change, while inconvenient, allows us to save the daylight in the summer months and prevents an extremely late sunrise in the middle of winter.
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