Sunday, December 23, 2007

Darkest day of the year

That was yesterday, at the winter solstice.

This is cool: a site I ran across calculates, for any location, the actual times of sunrise, sunset, and length of daylight. (Look up your own, on Sunrise, sunset, daylight in a graph.)

It gives the time for sunrise today at around 8:00 AM. Sunset is shortly after 4:00 PM. Around 4:15, by my clock.

And the daylight only lasts about 8 hours. 1/3 of the day. No wonder people suffer from SAD around here!

I didn't know this: at mid-summer, the longest days of the year, the sun is at its highest. But it is never directly overhead here, even then. The graph gives its maximum angle at 65 °: straight overhead would be 90 °. In winter it goes down to 16 ° from the horizon. At its highest point.

No wonder even our sunny days are chilly!

The photo is from an afternoon around this time last year, at 4:30 or thereabouts, at the White Rock Pier. And in a drizzly rain, of course.

3 comments:

  1. I love that graph - you put up the neatest stuff!

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  2. SAD and Vitamin D deficiency! We are even further north so our days are even just a little bit shorter than at the coast! I've so been looking forward to the turn around time ... but it takes almost the whole month of January for it to become really noticeable. When out skiing, the sun doesn't even crest the trees ... one has to be in quite an open place to get the sun.

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  3. That's a great site. The most important reason why we headed south this winter was for the light. That extra hour of daylight in the morning, and then again at sunset is really stunning. Makes all the difference in the world.

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I'm having to moderate all comments because Blogger seems to have a problem notifying me. Sorry about that. I will review them several times daily, though, until this issue is fixed.

Also, I have word verification on, because I found out that not only do I get spam without it, but it gets passed on to anyone commenting in that thread. Not cool!

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