"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours. . . ."
William Wordsworth, 1802
We can put politics aside for one day and reflect, as Wordsworth suggested, on the natural world.
Today is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
In Medford, Oregon, just north of the 42nd degree of latitude, the day length is 9:04:48; nine hours, four minutes, and 48 seconds. Tomorrow it will be 9:04:49, one second longer. The day after it will be 9:04.54 another four seconds longer. If you aren't noticing much difference in the length of days about now, you aren't imagining it. It is real. For 25 days, from December 9 (9:09:42) through January 2 (also 9:09:42), the length of days fluctuates within a 5 minute band.
Boston, Massachusetts is at almost exactly the same latitude, and its day length is similar: 9:04:35 today, with the same five minute plus or minus spread of day lengths, again from December 9 through January 2.
Sunset times on one's clock differ because of where a place is within a time zone band. The sun sets in Medford at 4:42 p.m. Pacific Time but it happens much earlier in Boston, at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time.
For comparison, Miami, which is closer to the equator, has less fluctuation in the lengths of days through the seasons. Miami will have 10:31:48 in daylight hours, almost an hour and a half more than Medford or Boston. The day length will be within that five-minute, plus-or-minus spread for 33 days in Miami.
This pattern is reversed at the summer solstice. Miami has 13 hours and 30 minutes of daylight (13:30) while Medford and Boston have an hour and 46 minutes more: Medford with 15:16:50: Boston with 15:17:04.
Day lengths are not intuitive unless one thinks hard about spheres and what one may remember about tangents from high school math. In Medford and Boston, with a difference in day-length between midwinter and midsummer of six hours and 10 minutes, the days need to allocate those 370 minutes over 183 days. In midwinter or midsummer the day lengths are nearly flat for a full month but the time is made up at the equinoxes. Day length in March changes almost three minutes per day. The shoulder-months of February and April, and of August and October, change by over two and a half minutes a day.
Sunset times might break into our conscious observations because we are awake and doing time-sensitive things like leaving work, making dinner, and watching scheduled shows on TV. Sunset in Boston is at 5:33 on March 1 and 7:08 on March 31. They change from 6:02 p.m. to 7:36 p.m. in Medford. A big difference in a month.
Wordsworth wrote about the alienating effect of the Industrial Revolution gathering steam around him in England. He thought "we were giving our hearts away, a sordid boon!" Get your sanity and soul back, he said. Observe nature.
This is the era of screens: The desktop screen where I am typing now, my laptops, I-pads, phone, the TV. My cars have screens along with warnings not to look at them. Look at the road instead, it warns. Good idea.
Notice nature. One way to do that is to plant a garden. We don't need the produce as much as we need the time in nature. Prepare now. Buy seeds. The days are getting longer.
Note: All times are standard time. There are multiple daylight/sunset sites. Here is one. Here is another.
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11 comments:
Nature is fascinating, especially when it intersects with politics. With Nature’s superstorms, firestorms and rising sea levels, she seems to be shouting at us, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?”
An interesting statistic: A 2021 poll found that 77% of voters had a favorable view of natural gas but only 29% felt the same about methane. Another 2021 poll found that Republican voters viewed natural gas more favorably when it was called fossil gas or fracked gas.
Happy Solstice!
8 hours and 29 minutes of sun in Olympia Washington, but Anchorage Alaska was where I really noticed with a 5 hour 29 minute window. Having lived through 40 Alaskan winters it was less the cold that chased us out, it was the dark. The super long days of sun around June 21 st also got a bit tiresome as it was hard to sleep when the sun was out. Yes, Mother Nature is even more important than politics. A walk in the woods is supported to have beneficial effects for our psychological well being.
A couple of years ago, the Florida voters approved legislation to keep Daylight Savings Time all year round. However, it takes an approval of Congress for it to take effect. So far, it hasn't be even brought up for a vote.
The shape of the light, rendered on a Mercator-ish projection. The shape changes as the year goes by. At the equinoxes, it is two vertical lines.
https://www.die.net/earth/
You can buy something like this that hangs on the wall called a Geochron Clock. In 1987, I saw one of these on the wall at a bank, and fell in love with it; but then I was sad when I found out they cost $1700 that I did not have.
At the time, I was interested in learning how to write code for the original Macintosh, and I t seemed like doing one of these in software would be a fun project. So I dived in, which involved learning a lot about the orbit of the earth around the sun. It turns out, for instance, that we are closest to the sun around New Year’s, which means we are moving faster in our orbit at that time, which means that the length of a solar day (as opposed to a sidereal day) is slightly longer.
There was no World Wide Web at the time, so learning how to do this involved things like going to a bookstore called Captain’s Nautical near Powell’s in downtown Portland and buying volume two of Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator.
Once I got it done, it occurred to me that I might be able to sell it. So I got reviews of Sun Clock published in a few Macintosh publications, and orders for it started coming in to my PO Box via US mail. Then I had to get floppy disks copied at a local company so I could mail them out in cardboard disk mailers. Later on, it was sold in software stores in a shrink-wrapped box.
https://track4change.com/images/products/sun-clock.jpg
Ah, the good old days… 😀
I got a lot of orders from ham radio operators. It turns out that radio waves propagate along the line between day and night, something I was completely unaware of until I asked one of my customers why so many hams were buying the software.
I also eventually did a version for the Palm Pilot, which you can play with on this emulator:
https://archive.org/details/palm3_sunclock
Doing Sun Clock was a lot of fun, quite educational, and helped me start my career as a very minor-league entrepreneur.
Daylight “savings” time doesn’t save anything; it shifts morning light to evening light. Bad for health (virtually all medical societies oppose it); good for business because people spend more money with longer evening hours.
Year-round DST would be hazardous for kids going to school, and the twice-yearly time change is hated by almost everyone.
Since this column is about 𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆, my wish is to respect her time. But I’ve been losing against Big Golf.
Thank you, Sally for enumerating so clearly reason we should never go to full time DST. I know that I personally never quite recover after switching to DST, until we get back to a more natural rhythm in the Fall.
Unfortunately, the Money will probably prevail.
I personally love DST. Longer daylight in the evening. Who doesn't love that? During WWII there was double DST. I guess so shift workers would have more time at night to get outdoors.
I hate it, as do most of the people I know and love.
My wife and I would personally prefer standard time year around.
Don't forget, neither Arizona nor Hawaii practice Daylight Savings Time.
It's not just Florida that requested a permanent change. Other states have had similar thoughts. Yes, federal laws would need to be enacted to make a permanent change.
About the time it's already getting dark too early, we have to fall back to standard time and suddenly it's dark an hour earlier. No wonder people get SAD (seasonal affective disorder).
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