I vey much enjoy that 'special-time-of-the-day' when the sun is setting or rising and the colors change in ways only one can know thru direct experience. I walk daily at around sunset and though my home is where ever I am - I am currently in east TN though was in New England thru summer & fall, I notice the changes of light from northern places to southern and so on.
So, being near 'Oimele'-ground hogs day- the sun seems to set near 6pm ET though the light in the sky lasts a bit longer. New England, sun sets earlier.

About 6.30pm

1.) Well, the Winter Solstice is two weeks past and I can roughly guess from experience that the shortest day of the year ends at about 5:00pm MST here in Montana. If my science teacher or some weatherman or whoever it was that gave me the info was right, then the sun sets about 3 minutes later every day after the winter solstice (and that much earlier after the summer). So, I'm going to guess between 5:45 and 6:00.

2.) I can also look at the position of the sun right now (3:00pm MST). It is at about 45 degrees. Remembering from astronomy class that the Sun's angle from the western horizon will decrease about 15degrees every hour, there are about three more hours before it sets. 3:00 plus 3 hours = 6:00.

Wow. Do I actually know this? Where the heck did that come from? lol And both of those methods lead to the same conclusion!

Sundown was just before I took out the compost and poked at the fire pit. That was while I was still hungry (before dinner), but before I came back here to sit at my PC. It was definitely before I started messing around with the Tide/current calculator (en;colorflood=blue;site=Ganges%20Harbour%2C%20British%20Columbia;d_year=;d_month=Jan;d_day=01;d_hour=00;d_min=00) and that was before I found your Help wanted page...

Today around 6pm .Where I live.
Currently every day a bit earlier.

The sun goes behind the mountain at 7:30 or so. After that I cannot see it.

Exactly the time the sun goes behind the forground viewplane.

About 8 pm as of 7/20/06. Sunset arrives here in stages that match up to steps in animal care. Sun below the tree line means out to do tasks that would be too hard during 100+ mid day heat, twilight means put up the chicken food & roosts, dusk means off with the horse fly masks, darkness is lock up the cats & feed the sheep dogs so they'll be nice and wound up to bark off the nightly coyote trials. Moon & star light mean open up the house to cool down overnight. And then sleep fast before it heats up again.

Approximately 8:29 pm

About 8:15. Notice because sun reflects off windows near my apartment.

after dinner

Where I live, it gets real dark when the Sun sets...

I go to http://www.weather.com and enter my zip code.

The time of sunset for a specific location is available through many media sources. I personally use www.yahoo.com - weather.

This information is posted in the local newspaper (Helena Independent Record) everyday on the weather page.

Between latitudes 35N and 36N, the sun generaly sets around 8:30pm for this month, with twilight extending to about 9:15. Of course the days are getting shorter, but the change is almost un-noticeable at this point.

When the Sun sets.

I would typically chase off to http://www.ec.gc.ca (Environment Canada) for any weather/sun-related interests. No idea what the exact time of sunset today. I would guess around 9 or 10pm. 21:17 PST is the official time it happens.

It's 8:00. I guessed about 8:35 based on my estimation of our proximity to the solstice, which I estimated at about 8:50, and the fact that I was outside a little while ago and it was pretty light. It looks like I'm over on my first estimation and failed to account for the lag in time between when I was actually outside and right now. Whoops.

around here at about 8:45pm

http://www.timeanddate.com/

7:48pm

59N08 1E44 sunset cirka 22.30. But it is getting darker earlier each day.

Reading Daniel Shawen's comment ("Sunset very much depends on where you are standing on the surface of the Earth.") reminded me of a cool double sunset I saw in Pennsylvania. My flight was delayed out of Philly, and we all saw a beauty of a sunset as we waited on the runway. Soon we took off, and I was surprised to see the sun rise again - or at least unset. We flew directly east, and kept up with the just-setting sun for several hours. It was very cool - almost as good as hanging out outside north of the Arctic Circle in midsummer, with hour after hour of sunset turning into sunrise.

I realized that this couldn't be done further south (without breaking mach 1), but further north one could fly west and "catch up" with the sun's (rather, Earth's) progress. The northern lower-48 U.S. is just the right latitude for keeping up, and take-offs are steep - so you can "reverse" a sunset. Pilots must get used to this; I suppose the reverse could happen, and a steep descent would allow you to see the "same" sunrise twice.

6:03 pm comes to mind.

I think it recedes about 4 minutes a day between December 21st and June 21st, and then goes back the other way about 4 minutes a day.

At some point you have to *know* (looking in the newspaper or here - http://www.elsewhere.org/yesclock/)

Sunset is getting later and later. Thank goodness. Today the sunset in Brandon, Manitoba is 5:30-ish Central Time.

When the sun gets within 15 degrees or so of the horizon, hold your arm out, place your hand perpendicular to your arm so you are looking at the palm side of your fingers. Count how many fingers you can fit between the bottom of the sun and your horizon. Each finger is worth 15 minutes.

A couple of early responses mentioned the US Naval Observatory site. Every year or two I grab their yearlong table of sunrise/sunset times for my city. At this time of year I monitor the gaining light in the afternoon and the losing light in the morning - or the long slow return of light. The site also explains three phases of twilight - civil, the brightest, when you might be able to play softball; nautical, which someone once told me was just light enough to navigate a boat into a harbor; and celestial, which is pretty dark for anything.

about 500 years ago we learned the sun doesn't set. I understand that our language takes a while to catch up.

that doesn't take away from the fact that I mightily appreciate the "return" of the sun, 1 week after solstice, adding about 21 minutes to that 4:20 PST time and then the hour for daylight savings, making my lightgone time about 5:22.

"lightgone" doesn't really work, but I do think we need a new, non-flat-earth word. "dusk" kind of works, but it seems to be pre event-horizon.

Sunset very much depends on where you are standing on the surface of the Earth. A local weather forecast of sundown will be close, but it doesn't necessarily apply to you or your situation in terms of the exact time of sunset. Here's why:

At the equator, someone standing on the surface being taken for a circular ride at about 1,000 mph. When the last ray of sunlight dips below the horizon, it is "sunset", but if you start running West at 1000 mph at the equator just before that event happens, the sun never actually "sets". Climbing a hill or a mountain likewise alters the exact moment of "sunset" where you happen to be standing. As if this were not complex enough, relativity warps spacetime nearer the surface of gravitating bodies, forcing us to think about what sunset is measured with respect to, and whether that instant would be different if it were an event viewed from space.

Though the above url is not connected with this, for 16 generations, my family was involved in writing panchanga ( almanac) My late father Krishnamurthy Sastry constructed a Sun Dial in 1940 at Annavaram village famous for the abode of Sri Vishnu situated at East Godavari dt, near Kakinada port of Andhra Pradesh of India, and he has given some mathematical calculations to know about the Sunrise and Sun set, if you are interested I can send the available details.

But I would also like to congratulate for the work you did and doing.

Subrahmanyam

A guy named John posted this in another comment, but it seems to belong here, so I'm copying it;

Knowing sunset without having to look it up
is a bit complex, except if you do it the easy way
which is remember what it was yesterday.

Figuring it out exactly just by thinking hard seems
like a bit of a time-waster, but if you want to,
it's pretty elementary 3-d geometry, left as an
exercise for the reader.

Ignoring DST for now (add it to the result when in),
on the equinox the sun rises and sets around 6pm.
On the solstice, it sets at 8:30 in the summer,
and around 4:20 in the winter. In between,
it's a sinusoid, but straight linear interpolation
yeilds a surprisingly small error (less than 10 minutes).

So then you have to take the result and add an hour
for DST if in force.

Those times are of course not accurate unless you
happen to be near 42 degrees latitude.

One could measure time using the sun... in which case sunset _is_ the time.

See intellicast.com or any of numerous other weather or almanac sites.

Remember when it set yesterday and assume it will be within a few minutes. Guess whether earlier or later than yesterday depending
on season.

http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp

Weather.com

We're approaching the autumnal equinox, but are still on daylight savings time, so I think sunset will be 7-ish. (I'm much better at predicting dawn.)

Hi Kevin,
This is a great quiz! A few months back I read that the average person one hundred years ago could identify 100s of plants, animals, rocks, birds, etc in their local environment. The article went on to compare this to present day's knowledge of company logos... this really hit home and I have tried to become more in tune with my local environment ever since. I have used a number of field guides to become more aware of animal, plant, insect life but felt I was missing the bigger picture. This quiz has pointed me in the right direction and I have spent a good deal of time researching the answers since it was posted.

Anyway, Weather Underground, www.wunderground.com provides answers to a number of the questions including 2, 5, 21 (for some locales), 30, and possibly 23 but I have to do more research into high tides.

Many Thanks,
Andrew

http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp

1. Go to the local weather report in the paper
2. Meterological sites on the net
3. Pay attention

One place you can go for this is:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/walm0.htm

Enter your zipcode, voila.

Offhand, around 7:30pm EDT. A quick check on www.wunderground.com tells me I'm within 8 minutes of civil twilight. Because I'm usually outside and have an excellent sense of time, I know when the sun sets.

Of course, there are different definitions of sunset: "actual", civil, nautical, and astronomical. Wunderground is a great resource for this info, plus length of day. Since I check the site every day for weather, I usually browse daylight length out of curiosity.

If you read a newspaper every day, and for me web browsing has supplanted newspaper reading while my son is small enough to require my attention in the AM, you get this info on the 2nd page of the Star-Ledger every single day. And I read it whenever I can.

Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html

about 8:20 pm EST

Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html the naval site is the easiest, but I generally either watch the sunset regularly or look on the weather page in my newspaper the seattle times.