Clyde Starlin, age 8, of Tucson, Arizona, for his question:

Do stars really rise at different times across the United States?

You would think that everybody in America could look up at the same stars at the same time. But this just isn't so. The stars and the sun and everything else in the sky rise in the east. And they all rise earlier in the eastern part of the country than they do in the west. Trace the eastern shoreline of America. Find the part that reaches farthest east out into the Atlantic Ocean. That is where the morning sun rises earliest in the land. That is where the stars rise earliest also. Hour by hour the morning sun dawns farther and farther westward across the land. It dawns over Arizona two hours later than it dawned on the east coast.

The stars also rise later and later as we travel from the east to the west. The people in Florida saw the same stars rise two hours before you saw them rise in Arizona. We have different time zones to measure these things. Arizona is in the Mountain Time Zone, where the stars rise two hours later than they do in the east and one hour earlier than they do in the far west.