In 1952, Gary Cooper starred in the classic American Western film, High Noon. During the course of this movie, a hotel clerk is heard saying,

“You’re leaving on the noon train, but your husband ain’t? It’s mighty interesting. Now me, I wouldn’t leave this town at noon for all the tea in China. No sir. It’s going to be quite a sight to see.”

High Noon. What does that mean to you? You might say that it’s twelve o’clock, midday, or the point where the sun is the highest in the sky. All of that is correct, but there’s a kind of high noon that’s higher than the rest. And, to quote the hotel clerk, it truly is mighty interesting.

Noon, relative to where you are, is the time when the sun is directly over the meridian line running from the earth’s poles through the point upon which you are standing. It’s the time of day when the shadows are shortest, and they all point directly toward the north or south pole–except when they don’t. Let me explain.

Think about the sun as though it were a light affixed to the ceiling in your living room. Assume further that there is just the one light in the room. Pretend you are a weirdo or a vampire or something like that and therefore have no windows in your living room. You just have one, solitary can light sunk into the ceiling of the room. Furthermore, you only have one chair. Weird folks like you never have any company, so there’s no need for a bunch of sofas or anything. Now, the light is directly overhead, but only relative to one spot in the room. Your shadow will be very short due to the small distance between you and your ceiling, but it will lie in one direction or another depending on where you stand in the room. It’s noon in the room all day, but it’s a special kind of noon if you are standing right under the can light.

The sun and earth have a special spot like this. It moves around the earth in the tropics every day. It only crosses land in the United States in the state of Hawaii. It’s such a bizarre event they even have a special name for it - Lahaina Noon.

Scientifically, the event is created when the sun reaches its zenith directly above the subsolar point, which is the fancy name for the special spot to which I refer above. Stuff looks mighty weird outside when this happens. People take pictures of flagpoles and other perpendicular objects which look like they are photoshopped into the photos because they appear to have no shadows at all. The light source, the sun, is directly overhead with no angle present to throw a shadow.

Not only is this “mighty interesting”, but to continue to quote the hotel clerk, it is quite a sight to see. I’ve only been to Hawaii once in my life. I had no idea about the concept of the Lahaina Noon when I made that trip or else I would have planned my travels to coincide with this remarkable dance between our star and planet.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books. His second novel, The Bit Dance is a cautionary tale about what can happen when technology runs away from its creators. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location:

https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_s…

His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/