Let me point out that for the purposes of logging flight time, *night* is defined under [14 CFR 1.1][1] as follows:

> Night means the time between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight, as published in the Air Almanac, converted to local time.

This means that sunset is not the deciding factor, but rather the published start and end times of civil twilight.

**For the flight details you give, the transition to legal night would probably occur almost two hours into the flight somewhere near Little Rock, Arkansas, around 23:30 UTC at the end of local civil twilight.** The specifics of that transition time and location will depend on  ground speed, cruise routing, time spent in the departure routing and climb, and so on.

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This same—or a similar—issue arises for slow aircraft over even relatively short distances. Any pilot flying any aircraft during the transition into or out of civil twilight where the time of civil twilight varies between the departure and destination points will face difficulty in determining exactly where and when the transition into legally loggable night time occurred.

When I was logging my first 100 hours of night time, I paid close attention to civil twilight on my flights so as to ensure I was not missing any loggable night time (and to ensure I wasn't incorrectly logging night time). Most of my 100 hours of night flight time took place in a C172 flying cross country into sunset or sunrise. To calculate the actual point where civil twilight began or ended, I consulted tables based on my route of flight and determined to proximate location and time that night began or ended.

Now I care less about the amount of night time I have, and generally just log a leg as night if that leg took place entirely during night conditions. I suspect many professional pilots do the same.

While one might contest that my more conservative approach fails to meet the logging requirements of [14 CFR 61.51][2] which require the pilot to log the...

> (3) Conditions of flight—

...as either...

> (i) Day or night.

...I think that the more conservative approach of logging the time as day unless proven to be otherwise is acceptable.


  [1]: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6e252ededf5de4519018b7a8b09b0d87&mc=true&node=se14.1.1_11&rgn=div8
  [2]: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=6e252ededf5de4519018b7a8b09b0d87&mc=true&node=se14.2.61_151&rgn=div8