NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Rommel John Miller
Date: 2014 Sep 23, 11:32 -0700
It's true, the sun never really sets, the phenomena of the sun's movements is simply realtive to the observers postion on the chart. Everything is relative from that point from east to west and celestial equator which pretty much corresponds.
The sun never setting on the good old British Emprire is just a saying, but it makes sense, before the sun ever sat in one colonial holding it was daylight in another.
Canada on the North American Continent, but in and across the Pacific? I don't think so, that is why the Brits had a large and powerful Navy. You might surmise then that the sun never sets on the US Navy, and in most cases I guess that is true, somewhere at any given point in time a US Warship is under sunlight and before the sun sets it will be shining on another boat to the west.
My crazy dream as a kid was to run fast enough to keep up with the point of daybreak all around the globe. Like Mercury I would be able to speed and traverse the land and sea and always be greeting a new day. But the reality of it would be that I would only be running away from the dawn and thus fulfilling the advice of Greeley to "Go West" west however is on relative as well. Ah, the romance of youth. Where has it gone in my cynical old age?