Summer Solstice

This last week, on the 21st of June, we had Summer Solstice, that is to say, the first day of summer and also the longest day of the year. How long that day is depends upon at what latitude you live at. If you live down on the Equator (the good Lord help you then), there's not any difference from any other day of the year. But the further north, or south, you go, the difference becomes more noticeable. Here in Gateshead, England, my home is exactly 4.4 miles south of the 55 degrees North latitude and the difference is much larger than I ever experienced back home in NW Georgia. Here, the sun rose at 4:27 am or there abouts, being that I live less than 10 miles from the North Sea. And it sat at 9:48 pm that evening! Not only that, but when it rises and sets at this time of the year, it's not more than 20 degrees or so from the North Pole on either side. That means that if I were up at 4:30 in the morning (and that's a mighty BIG if), I'd almost be looking north to see the sunrise.

Last night (June 26th), Rebecca and I watched it set just to the left of directly north by about the same difference. Now seeings how I majored in mathematics at one college and minored in it at another university, well that is until I failed Calculus 4 years running, I figured that we only got about 5 and a half hours of darkness that night of the 21st. Truth be known, it doesn't really get dark at night up here at this time of year. It gets to a faint twilight before it starts getting brighter before sunrise. That's mighty strange to this ole Georgia Boy!!! Back home, it'd at least get completely dark for a few hours before the next day came around. But right now, up here, it's not a good time for amateur astronomers because we like really dark nights for good seeing conditions.

And the same thing, only in the opposite way, happens on December 21st, Winter Solstice. The sun doesn't rise until 8:28 am and sets at 3:40 pm! When I went in to work during that time last year, it was completely dark when I got on the bus to go to work and it would have been dark for almost 2 hours by the time Rebecca would pick me up when I got off from work. It seemed like it was dark all the time! It just didn't seem natural at all. As you might guess, they have a higher than normal percentage of people that suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a type of depression brought on by not getting enough sunlight.

Speaking of living so far north, you know, it doesn't get as cold here as you would think. This last winter, I think the lowest temperature I experienced was about 23 degrees Fahrenheit. And as I remember it, we went a week without any cloud cover or any wind at night that time, and where the sun didn't shine, the frost got to be about an inch to an inch and a half thick over the week. At that time of the year, the sun doesn't get very high in the sky, so that left a lot of territory covered in frost for a while, and it accumulated as the week passed. Now that was strange!