Default day and night across the grid

I now have two parcels on different continents. I just logged in today and noticed one parcel is in broad daylight while the other is at midnight. Is there a specific pattern to the default day / night cycle? Does it move across the grid as in the real world? If so, how many "time zones" would there be and where are the dividing lines?

And for the obligatory drama question, would you consider this cheating on your real life day / night cycle?

I have wondered this as well.

Mainland may have a single clock, I don't know. I've noticed that private estates can vary a lot...I've even traveled from one sim to another within an estate, and gone from midnight to noon with a border crossing.

Both of my parcels are on mainland, but two different continents. I never really went rapidly between them before. The one on the newer continent (whose name I forget, Atlantis, Neptune, something liek that) was day, the one one the old continent was night. Or at least so I thought. Now they seem to be in sync again. Very strange . . .

Private Estates can set their own time I think, certainly they can freeze time at a certain point so it is always noon or midnight or whatever, and I think they can set their day/night cycle as they like. Not sure if it can be done for a whole estate or has to be done sim by sim.

Don't know if you can do the same on mainland if you own the whole sim.

Depends if the 2 continents are in the same timezone wouldn't it as the su travels from east to west.It can be dark in Europe while Australia is in Broad daylight. Maybe the daylight hours are seasonal with days and nights changing length as you go further from the equator?

There IS a day/night cycle. A day lasts 4 hours, and there is even an actual terminator, (the line that divides night and day. Not a humanoid robot.) that travels across the grid

If you go someplace where you can see the east and west horizons, you can see the sun go down as the moon goes up.

If you are capable of running the latest RC viewer, you can enable shadows and see them move in relation to the time of day.

So there IS a terminator. That's what I was fishing for! Wouldn't it be cool if it showed up on the big map?

I was really interested to see if there was a terminator that moved across the map, so I found the most easterly and westerly points I had access to and TP'd between them at dawn. Looking east, in mouselook, I waited until the top edge of the sun was at the top of my screen with the crosshair on the horizon.

I couldn't see any apparent difference between the sun's height above the horizon at these two points. For reference they were Toyger (east) and Bord du Lac (west). When you go that far west, there is only estate land, so it's possible that the estate time was set differently, but I tried three others and the result was the same. The most westerly mainland (I think) is in Bay City, and there was no appreciable difference their either. Bord du Lac is about 3 times as far to the west from Toyger as Bay City is.

There is certainly a day-night cycle of 4 hours, with roughly 3 hours daylight to 1 hour of night, but I don't think a terminator moves across the grid. Or maybe the grid is just too small for the effect to be visible?

I seem to recall that in the SL WIKI they posted a translation between PST times and the day/night cycle. It implied that the default time changes all at the same time, grid-wide (With the exception of private sims that have changed their cycle to a fixed time of day or night). I'll see if I can locate that information again.

From what I recall of the Estate management controls, there is no way for a sim owner to establish an "offset" from teh grid's day/night cycle. You can't, for example, declare that the sun will rise 2 hours later in your sim. Your options are A:Grid day cycle *or* B:Lock the sun at a specific time of day/night, no change cycle.

But aside from this, I have noticed some times where I left one sim and it was daytime, and on arrival in the other it was night, and as far as I could tell, both had cycling times. So I suspect the synchronization isn't very accurate between sims.