Counting the hours
December 1, 2015 8:09 PM   Subscribe

 
Eight hours 58 minutes here today—8:41 is our minimum. Ugh. Give me the other solstice, at 15:43, any day. (Ok, technically only one day.)
posted by traveler_ at 8:25 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


I’ve always liked the charts that Gaisma generates (the discontinuity in the bands in the main chart reflect the daylight savings time changes).
posted by D.C. at 8:27 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


6:43, and that assumes the sun is clear of the mountains, which it isn't for 4 of those hours.
posted by furtive at 8:46 PM on December 1, 2015


All of it.

That's how much I get.

ALL OF IT.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:58 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


8:43 today here. Just came back from Los Angeles and was a little taken aback when the sun was fully down when I went to pick up my daughter from school. My sisters are coming to visit on the 4 shortest days of the year and I have a feeling by the end of their visit they'll have made a firm decision never to move to my region.

I thought I was managing winter a bit better than last year but maybe it just hadn't gotten dark enough yet.
posted by town of cats at 8:58 PM on December 1, 2015


Here in LA, shortest day is 9:53 and longest is 14:26. So only 4:30 difference, I can't really process what it must be like to live somewhere with extreme swings like Alaska.
posted by thefoxgod at 9:26 PM on December 1, 2015


I love the Canadian contributions to this thread. (Shoutout to my hometown Edmonton, coming up on 7.5-hour days!) I'm sorry, guys, you'll get it all back in June.
I also love that some of the tax dollars I spend on the USDoD are made into neat things like this. Thanks for posting!
posted by gingerest at 9:48 PM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


This must be "possible sunshine" rather than "actual sunshine", because western NY pretty much lives in Tupperware this time of year.

(credit to Bill Bryson, of course)
posted by Lucinda at 10:03 PM on December 1, 2015 [8 favorites]


We never get below 8:24 a day?! How is that possible? It's only December 1 and already I feel like the days are 47 minutes long TOPS.
posted by KathrynT at 10:11 PM on December 1, 2015 [6 favorites]


Today 6:06
Shortest 5:27
Longest 19:22
And I'm not even in the northern part of Alaska.
posted by rhapsodie at 10:34 PM on December 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


I have only 8:43 of daylight and the rest is glorious wonderful darkness.

Thanks for posting this!
posted by ilovewinter at 10:52 PM on December 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


As someone who is going to Iceland over the holidays, I will be enjoying every bit of the 4 hours and 7 minutes (!) of daylight on the solstice.
posted by mollymayhem at 11:09 PM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


I like The Doctor's definition of Christmas: halfway through the dark.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:20 PM on December 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


I don't have a window in my office, so I get to subtract at least 8 hours from most of those days. There are days when I literally am not exposed to any sunlight.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:39 PM on December 1, 2015


6:06 today. We have another half hour to lose yet before it starts to get better, and we have no snow to help brighten things up.

If any of y'all need me I'll be over in the corner sobbing quietly and dreaming of the day I teach in a classroom *with windows.*
posted by charmedimsure at 12:16 AM on December 2, 2015


7 hours 23 minutes today, most of that filtered through clouds and torrential rain. But it'll be 17 hours 36 minutes in June! *claws weakly towards daylight*
posted by Catseye at 12:18 AM on December 2, 2015


Our minimum (8:23) isn't as bad as you folks further north, but damn do days feel super short. I am grateful for full spectrum "happy" lights to fight SAD. And I don't know how people before such modern technology didn't drink themselves to death.
posted by weathergal at 1:32 AM on December 2, 2015


I often wish I lived closer to the equator so the days could be more even. I hate these sad-ass dark winter days, but the really long summer days don't exactly make up for it. I get a little nervous in July when the sun's already up at 5:30 and I'm just wasting all that excess light.
posted by Metroid Baby at 3:24 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I guess that theoretically we get nine and a half hours of daylight but since it's been raining every day, you can't really prove that by me.
posted by octothorpe at 4:10 AM on December 2, 2015


9:28 today, although I don't think the sun is coming out here. Fog and rain.

This was a really interesting chart to see, though. It doesn't seem so terribly bad now, and to know we'll be back at 9:28 on January 10th? I guess that's not awful.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:36 AM on December 2, 2015


10:04 here in Atlanta, which is fine by me, but it doesn't start early enough in the mornings. We really should be on central time. Our latest sunrises are right around 8:00 which is bullshit for this far south.
posted by madcaptenor at 5:02 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


4:59 today, and still losing 5 minutes a day down to 4:08. I enjoy these long winter nights.

And Mollymayhem, as someone who lives in Iceland, there is actually a lot more "daylight" than that. Assuming there is not a snowstorm. You get 2+ hours of very pretty twilight on either end.
posted by Nothing at 5:08 AM on December 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


9:34 today, with only 12 more minutes to lose this year in Denver. I don't know how I survived at higher/cloudier latitudes. Unhappily, that's for sure.
posted by deludingmyself at 5:12 AM on December 2, 2015


In Rochester, NY it's best described as "potential daylight" thanks to our frequent clouds and overcast days. But I guess it's fun to imagine.
posted by tommasz at 5:21 AM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


What this doesn't convey is the fact that at around 52°N (where London sits, about the same latitude as Montreal), those 7:48 of daylight come from various nautical/astronomical notions of "twilight" that do not actually involve "the sun shining anywhere I can see".

In December we get the sun kind of lazily heaving up just over the horizon, then dropping out of sight after a couple hours.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 6:41 AM on December 2, 2015


What this doesn't convey is the fact that at around 52°N (where London sits, about the same latitude as Montreal), those 7:48 of daylight come from various nautical/astronomical notions of "twilight" that do not actually involve "the sun shining anywhere I can see".

From this table, on December 21 you have a 8:04 AM sunrise and a 3:53 PM sunset. 7 hours, 49 minutes of the sun actually over the horizon, which sounds miserably short to me as someone who's never been that far north in winter.

I think you're complaining about clouds. Which is a totally reasonable thing to complain about!
posted by madcaptenor at 6:58 AM on December 2, 2015


07:52 today, 07:30 in a few weeks to 17:00 in summer.
posted by kersplunk at 9:00 AM on December 2, 2015


How do I get that data onto a calendar? Sort of like this circular calendar, but with information for my exact latitude?

Coming up on 9:05, which I guess isn't so bad, but still makes me feel icky in all sorts of ways. It would be nice to have a way to visualize sunlight hope.
posted by epanalepsis at 10:11 AM on December 2, 2015


I got really nerdy about this last year, which was the first time I really paid attention to sunset times owing to a relatively new bicycling obsession.

I had always sort of assumed that the "light loss" day to day in the fall was linear, but of course it isn't. What surprised me about it is that while the largest day to day differences are fairly late in the process (in Houston, during September, it's like 1:45 per day), the biggest day to day difference in the amount lost day to day happens much, much earlier.

I bookmarked this site for reference, and my own longer writeup of my nerdery is here.
posted by uberchet at 1:29 PM on December 2, 2015


psst epanalepsis

http://www.sunrisesunset.com/
posted by xorry at 1:53 PM on December 2, 2015


I hate winter, still. I go outside and it's dark dark dark and everyone's crazy in the streets because they can't see and I wanted to go to an elective thing at 7 tonight and I go home and by 5:25 I am all fuck this, it's DARK AND COLD AND I DON'T WANNA LEAVE JUST WANT TO STAY HOME AND STUFF MY FACE FOR HOURS.

I hate winter. I hate winter. I hate winter.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:59 PM on December 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm not complaining about the clouds. I'm saying that the sun spends a great deal of those 7 hours and 49 minutes over the nautical horizon but behind trees and buildings and hills. And when it DOES get over those, it's a wan late-evening sun and not something that actually warms you and the shadows are still long and plentiful.

I'm complaining about the angle of the sun, rather than clouds.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:30 AM on December 3, 2015


This is great and I also really like the charts generated by Gaisma. Thanks!

The US Naval Observatory also has as site that will show the altitude and azimuth of the sun (or moon) throughout the day.
posted by mountmccabe at 10:30 AM on December 3, 2015


The biggest day to day difference in the amount lost day to day happens much, much earlier.

In other words, you're looking at the second derivative of day length. Figure that day length is roughly sinusoidal with period one year (an approximation that works at low latitudes), then since the second derivative of sin(x) is -sin(x), the amount lost day to day is increasing fastest exactly when the day length is largest.

This isn't exactly true because day length isn't exactly sinusoidal (it's probably closer to true at low latitudes), and if you're specifically focused on sunset time (not day length) there are some other perturbations, but it at least gets in the right neighborhood.
posted by madcaptenor at 11:27 AM on December 3, 2015


Run-soaked space hobo, that makes sense. At the ski resort near Anchorage (we're at 61 degrees N) there are some days where you can't ever see the sun because it never comes far enough above the horizon to get over the range of mountains across the water.

Here is a time lapse my husband took from our upstairs window at winter solstice a couple years ago that illustrates why Alaskans are so excited when the sun bloops up into the tinted part of the windshield for the first time at the end of Februrary....it just kind of skims the horizon for a month or in Dec./Jan.
posted by charmedimsure at 12:40 PM on December 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


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