A Long Day

Went with Christine to see an exhibition called Ideas at the Ingleby Gallery. Ideas is a collection of artworks by Katie Paterson and one of them is these nine clocks on a wall, with each clock calibrated to tell you what time it is on Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in relation to time on earth.

Now just as you're thinking "Why the bloody hell would I ever want to know what time it is right now on Jupiter?" you realise that there might be a bit more to it than that. And that's when you realise that days last different lengths of time depending on what planet you are on. On Jupiter, for example, a day only lasts 9 hours 56 minutes. Days on Mars are just 40 minutes longer than days on Earth. But - get a load of this - on Mercury a day lasts for 4,223 hours. Think about that next time you complain about having had a long day.