Who is the last to celebrate New Year's Eve?

When the sun is at its highest point above the horizon, it is said to be noon. Since the earth rotates, it is 12 noon at one point on the earth and later or even earlier at another. Hence it happens that people pop the corks at different times on New Year's Eve. But who's the last to celebrate New Year's Eve?

Who celebrates when - the time zones make for differences

• A time zone is a part of the earth in which people align themselves with the same time and date. Ideally, such a zone is an area in the shape of a two-sphere triangle. It runs from the North Pole to the South Pole and is bounded by two meridians. Within such an area, mankind celebrates New Year's Eve at the same time, even if some live in the northern hemisphere and others in the southern half of the earth.
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• There are exactly 24 such time zones across the globe. When the Greenwich meridian was determined to be the prime meridian in 1884, the time of this meridian was named "Greenwich Mean Time" (in German: mean Greenwich time). Today it is abbreviated as UTC (Universal Time Coordinated or German: coordinated world time). Based on this, the time in the adjacent time zone is always calculated one hour further (towards the east) or one hour back (towards the west).
• Our Central European Time (CET) is therefore given as UTC + 1h. That is, it is the time zone that is directly east of Greenwich Mean Time. In London, New Year's Eve is celebrated an hour later than in Berlin.

The last thing people in Alaska celebrate is New Year's Eve

• New Year's Eve is celebrated first in New Zealand, namely when the time can be specified as UTC +12. That goes for the Fiji Islands and other islands in the South Pacific. The last thing to do is celebrate New Year's Eve where the clock is on UTC - 11. This is Alaska, for example. It is difficult to determine who will celebrate the last New Year's Eve exactly. Because the date line falls in the middle of the Pacific. It is near the 180. Longitude.


Time zones on New Year's Eve - this is how the 24-hour party works

If you don't want to celebrate New Year's Eve for just a few hours, you should know the time zones in order to ...

• In earlier times these time differences hardly played a role. It was only with the invention of the railroad that it became necessary to coordinate the timetables according to standardized times. In the age of air travel and the Internet, this becomes even more important. Because whoever is in Germany celebrates and wants to congratulate his friends in New York, don't call too early. In the end, it doesn't seem to matter who is celebrating the last New Year's Eve when the family is scattered across the globe. Then it is more important to agree on a time together when everyone symbolically wishes good luck in the New Year at the same time.
• In reality, an actual time zone deviates from the ideal of the time zones, because national borders do not coincide with the course of the meridians. In many countries there is a common binding time that has been set by the state. A distinction is made here between the ideal and the actual time zone. Some countries with very large expansions have different time zones, others have stipulated by law that only one time zone should still apply. So it can happen that the people of a meridian would have to celebrate right away, starting from the ideal time zone, but after the time set by the state, they celebrate New Year's Eve with a time delay.