The idea of writing this article came to me on the 25th of June 2003 when I was listening to Cairo radio announcing that Maghrib prayer is due in Cairo city while I was sitting in my home town at 400 miles North East of Cairo. What is interesting is that at exactly the same time a next door mosque, in my home town, was also calling for the Maghrib prayer. This makes me wonder : how could it be that sunset is simultaneous at two locations separated by a distance of 400 miles from each other and at different Latitudes & Longitudes. As a reminder Maghrib prayer time occurs everywhere at sunset.
In what follows we explore this issue and try to prove or disprove the simultaneity of sunset at two different locations. In so doing we are led to some interesting conclusions and as a bonus we got ourselves an animation of the Terminator circle on the surface of the globe.
Aside from its modest value and its originality ( I am not aware of anything similar to it ) this article is a good exercise in Maple programming.
May this article be a stimulus for some readers to get interested in Astronomy which is a science as ancient as the early human civilizations.