It all started with a simple observation. As the winter solstice, December 21, 2009, approached, I realized that sunset was already getting later each day. On a whim, I pulled up a chart of the sunset and sunset times for my area, and to my surprise, found that the solstice had neither the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset of the year. This was quite a surprise.
Now in case this makes you furrow your eyebrows instead of raising them in sympathetic surprise, here is why this is strange to me — as winter approaches, the days get shorter. So you expect that sunrises get later and sunsets get earlier. And if you’re like me, and expect some kind of symmetry in the world, you would expect that the shortest day of the year (solstice) would be the coincidence of the latest sunrise and earliest sunset of the year.
But this isn’t so. Curious.
Because i sometimes like playing with numbers, i pulled the sunrise/sunset chart into Excel, and after some wrangling to get a graph that came close to illustrating my point, i came up with this:
(click on it and it’ll be a little bigger)
It’s not perfect, but it gives you the idea… the curve of sunset time and sunrise time do not mirror each other, and do not coincide at the solstice, yet somehow the solstice still manages to be the shortest day of the year. The bumpiness of the curve, by the way, is because the times are only to the nearest minute, so the rounding of time to the minute causes the graph to be a little bumpy (most noticeable in the day length). But you get the idea.
So now, even after the solstice, sunrise is still getting a little later each day. Or is it?
Dissatisfied, i turned to the internet and found this site. After reading it twice, it left me feeling a bit dull and still utterly confused. But the third time something finally clicked. It’s us.
Why doesn’t solstice seem to work like it ought to? Because we are not working with real time. We are working with our best attempt to make clocks and calendars describe the world around us. And we don’t quite get it right. Do daylight savings changes and leap years sound familiar?
In order for the above graph to show two nice bell curves (one inverted) that meet and just touch at the solstice, our “day” would have to be set up so that noon was always exactly centered between sunrise and sunset. But instead, our day is all screwed up to fit our various needs. In fact, looking at a chart of sunrises and sunsets, it is pretty hard to know where the solstice falls. We need experts to tell us.
In other words, this would all make a lot more sense if we were still using sun dials. Before clocks, the “time” of the day was always relative to the sun. The middle of the day was, well, when the sun reached its zenith. Time by measured by the sun is much different than time measured by your cell phone. It actually reflects the natural world, not the human one.
And that’s the problem. When i want to know what is going on outside, i go to the internet, i check my clock, and i look at a calendar. I’ll even check the weather on the internet before i go outside. All of this is a world of our own invention. The real world is right out there, outside the door. Our calendar, and even our watch, helps us to stay a little less connected to the ground under our feet and the way that the world turns.
What the Owl Knows 