Here's an interesting article with great maps about how the solstice works,
I think this is our first exclusively BetterMost holiday: Longerdays!
Some surprise good news. TODAY is the earliest sunset of the season. Sunrises will continue getting later and later until the 21st. Thanks to Earl Mellor for the info.
Apologies if I asked you this same question five years ago, but why?
It's kind of complicated. This site explains it rather well:
https://abc7ny.com/winter-solstice-latest-sunrise-earliest-sunset-solar-time/8593291/ (https://abc7ny.com/winter-solstice-latest-sunrise-earliest-sunset-solar-time/8593291/)
NYC had its earliest sunset on the 7th. Here in Denver, it's happening around 4:35 pm each day.
For quite some time, sunset here has been at 4:37 pm. You can set your watch by it.
4:33 here. This is the darkest week of the year.
At last! Sunset is past 5 pm here in these parts. And sunrise is at 7:18 am.
Some surprise good news. TODAY is the earliest sunset of the season. Sunrises will continue getting later and later until the 21st. Thanks to Earl Mellor
for the info.
Yup. According to Google, the Winter Solstice is Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 10:59 a.m. EST.
I remind myself now and then throughout the day that we've arrived at Longerdays. Very comforting!
Yes! And I try to gauge wether darkness comes noticeably later already. :laugh: I'm not sure about it, but I do think it's getting brighter in the mornings. Hard to be sure however since I have a lovely period off work and get to sleep in every day.
This is one reason why I enjoy getting an almanac geared to the latitude where I live. It gives the time of sunrise and sunset every day, so it's possible to track the times of sunrise and sunset and watch sunrise get earlier and sunset later as the world moves from winter toward spring. In addition, at the beginning of each week, there is a notice of the length of the day. For example, this Sunday the length of the day is given as 9 hours 25 minutes. Next Sunday it's 9 hours 32 minutes. That's a gain of 7 minutes.
Goodbye to 8 pm sunsets in Denver. Tonight will be the last one until May 2023. :-\
Yes, you can set your location. When I pulled it up it was set for Denver. In Minneapolis, today's sunset is at 8:26. One of the few advantages of living this far north. By the end of the month it will be at 7:54.
Although then I plugged in Grand Marais, MN, a small vacation town up by the Canadian border. I've always thought sunset seemed especially late up there. But this table has it slightly earlier than here -- 8:21 and 7:46, respectively.
It's the funniest thing. We've had this discussion before, and I still don't get it. :laugh:
I know our seasons come about because of the tilt of the earth's axis roughly 25.5 degrees, and I know "the sun doesn't set above the Artic Circle" in high summer. Yet as I visualize the sun "moving south" from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox, I still don't get why it doesn't get dark earlier "up north." It still seems counterfactual to me, even though I observed the phenomenon first had when I made my big cross-country train trip. It was later in the summer, and when the train stopped in northern Montana, it was light later in the evening than it would be back home. :laugh:
Maybe what I should do is the old science class trick of sticking a pencil through a styrofoam ball and moving it around a light bulb. ;D Then I have to make sure I have the pencil tilted enough and in the right direction. :laugh:
These times are affected not just by longitude but also by latitude -- that is, where the city is located within the time zone.
I'm afraid you have that backward. Latitude is how far north (or south) of the Equator you are. Longitude is how far you are located west (or east) of the Prime Meridien (which runs through Greenwich, England).
You can see this in action in Close Encounters, where the UFO guys are getting this stream of numbers, and somebody recognizes them as latitude and longitude coordinates (which turn out to be for Devil's Tower).
Weird. Not to quibble, but this site says it's supposed to rise at 6:20 a.m. today. I'm hoping this is a sign the sun is rethinking its planned route this year and will just stick with the 14-hour days throughout the winter.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/denver?month=8 (https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/denver?month=8)
Well, I didn't think we were going to be scientific about it :laugh:. I meant the sun wasn't in the sky...I couldn't see it. It may have risen above the horizon, but it's got to travel farther before I can see it at my house.
I don't mean to draw out this debate, but I'm curious about a couple of things. 1) What gets in the way of your seeing the sun at sunrise -- trees, houses, or ... ? and 2) Does Denver not get good sunsets because the mountains block it or are they far enough away that they aren't really a factor? Obviously I've been in Denver for many sunsets but don't remember noticing or being disappointed. In fact, I do vaguely remember once arriving in the evening to a bright orange western sky. But sunsets are super important to me, partly because I am rarely up for sunrises (and now also because my apartment faces west so I see sunrises only reflecting off buildings and trees). I do distinctly remember that one thing I disliked about living in NYC for a year was skyscraper sunsets -- losing the sun and walking in shadows much earlier than you would without all those buildings in the way.
For nearly 20 years, when the weather was clear, I could see the most beautiful sunsets in October from my condo. I would check the time of sunset in my almanac, and many times I've stood by my dining room windows and actually watched the sun sink below the horizon. Then just after sunset the sky overhead could be a very deep navy blue in color. As you moved your eyes from directly above down to the horizon, the sky went through all the colors of the rainbow down to a very deep red just at the horizon.
Now the new high rise next door blocks my view to the west-southwest, where the sun sets in October.
It seems like just yesterday I was warning people that the sun was going to start setting before 8 pm. But now I see that in just a day or two, it's going to set before 7 pm! Stop the world, I want to get off!
There is a ray of hope (literally). I'm told we've passed the earliest sunset of the season. The sun will continue to set at about the same time for a week or two, then afternoons will lengthen by about 4 minutes a day.
Sunrises--that's a different story. They'll continue to be later until December 21st. Keep that inner light burning bright until then!
Thanks for the update, FRiend! I've now reached the point where I have no sun shining directly into my apartment. Last week I got about 30 minutes a day of direct sun; now the sun doesn't climb above the other wing of the building. Then it disappears altogether by about 4:30 and it's pitch dark in less than an hour. Depressing!
Depressing indeed! Right now, since my office is right inside my living room windows, I have to close the curtains for a couple of hours in mid-day because the sun is shining directly into the windows. After some time I can open them again because the sun has moved behind the new high rise next door. :(
This kind of speaks to why I like to put up Christmas lights outdoors. If the lights come on shortly after dark, I like to be able to look out a window and see the lights shining in the darkness. It's sort of like the lights are defying the darkness.
You wonder how the Ancients figured out how bit by bit the daylight began increasing after December 21. I mean, sure, eventually you would notice (by February at least, its really noticeable), but it's such a small increment at first. How did they figure out when the solstice was? It makes perfect sense to me that you would have a celebration of some sort to celebrate the coming return of the unconquered sun.
My office is right inside my living-room windows, too. At this time of year I'll take all the sunlight I can get! In the summer it's too much in late afternoon and I'm forced to turn on the AC for an hour or two.
Do you have a balcony? I've thought about putting lights up either inside or on my balcony.
Good question! At some point, of course, they fashioned some kind of time-keeping device. Certainly by the time Stonehenge was built. A sundial wouldn't be that precise though, would it?
I still don't quite understand why sunsets start getting later mid-month but sunrises keep going. I mean, I realize the result is that total hours of daylight continue shrinking until the 21st, but why would it be one-sided like that?
The real problem that I have is that because of the way I have to situate things, I get sun on the computer monitor, and that, of course, makes it difficult if not impossible to work.
I think I tried that once years ago, but I couldn't figure out how to run an extension cord except keeping the sliding door open a crack. Today I suppose there might be battery-powered lights that I could use. I had a large illuminated star that I hung in the dining room window until I went down to the street myself and learned that nobody could see it from outside anyway.
The place I really like to see the outdoor lights is at my dad's house. It's in a suburban neighborhood, so it's really dark at night, especially at this time of year when it gets dark so early.
Maybe it's a chicken or the egg kind of thing. They had to know where and when the solstices were in order to build Stonehenge to tell them when the solstice was.
Sunset here today is 4:34. By New Year's Eve it will be 4:41. But we'll only add four minutes of daylight, due to that weird phenomenon of sunrise getting later for a while, even as days are lengthening. I know we've talked about that before but I can't remember if anyone could explain it. My best guess is it has to do with our location within the time zone.