if you stood on the ideal with one foot on each side what they would it be
Answers
Explanation:
Trick question. Since you have "crossed" the IDL, each foot would be in a different day. If you wore a watch on both hands, technically, they should be set to different days and dates. The question of what time those watches should be set to is not as easy to answer.
Depending where on the IDL you're standing, the times could be anywhere from equal to one hour different. Here is where Daylight Savings Time can mess things up, as some locations observe it and others don't. And then there's that fractional time zone complication.
But to "stand astride the IDL" isn't easy. Unless you're on a boat anchored at the IDL, there's really no place you could "stand" in the manner described except near the poles. Since the meridians of longitude converge at the poles, it's possible to walk across multiple time zones on an arbitrarily short hike. One kilometer from either pole, time zones are only 262 meters wide. If you were exactly on either pole, you could stand with one foot in all 24 time zones.
Things get a lot simpler by using only a few time zones near the poles. Some scientific bases in Antarctica use New Zealand time (UTC±12), as that's a popular embarkation point for travel to Antarctica. Others set their clocks to UTC. Astronauts on the International Space Station do the same thing. The ISS is moving at the astounding speed of 4.7 miles per second (7.7 km/s). That's 5.7 times faster than a speeding bullet. The ISS makes one trip around the Earth every 90 minutes. So in 24 hours, the occupants experience 32 day and date alternations, and enjoy 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. To keep things simple, their clocks are set to UTC+0.