Today is the day when we all get 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. After today, those of us here in the northern hemisphere will have shorter and shorter days until the solstice in December, the shortest day.
This weekend we will celebrate the equinox as we normally do with fire (we have one of those outside fireplace things), food and beer. Several of our new friends will come over to enjoy piles of food. Hopefully we won't get rained on!
Boo for short days and Yay for beer and fire!
ReplyDeleteLove the fire and beer celebration idea. You have lived in many places. Have you experienced the light at 9 am dark at 2pm you will get in a Scottish winter?
ReplyDeleteI use http://www.earthtools.org/ to find out sun rise and sun set times, as well as a load of other info for any location in the world. Move the map to the cross and keep zooming in until you find your town, then click on the option you want.
ReplyDeleteSteve
Superpooky, actually yes I have: I lived in Moscow for 3 years, so I experienced those short days (and even when the sun was up it was at such a low angle, and with so much cloud cover, it seemed like night anyway). But in Russia we had temps of -30 for months at a time! Happily, the winters here may be as dark but are not as extremely cold.
ReplyDeleteSteve what a fantastic website! Using it I discovered that I now live 1.5 degrees farther north than I did in Moscow! It will make little difference in my daylight hours though.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, my current latitude (57 degrees north) is not the farthest north I've lived. That would be 64 degrees north, when I lived in Alaska.
I'm just a little bit south of 47 degrees North and only a few kilometres west of the Greenwich Meridian.
ReplyDeleteI use that site for a lot of my radio spectrum management work.
I once lived in Cyprus, 34.6 N 33 E Sun rise and Sun set times don't vary a lot there week to week no matter what time of year. Also the time for the sun to go down is also very quick.
I have noticed quite a difference since moving from Kent to here in France a change of about 4 degrees further south
Steve, you might like this website (if you haven't already seen it), it shows the position of ships all over the world. It even tells what type of ship each one is. You can see the ships move when you refresh the page!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
Just zoom in on a quadrant to see the ships there.
I do like this thread! In relation to Steve's comment about sunrise and sunset times, I tend to start looking at those in February. I leave for work around 7am in the morning and get home around 7pm, so I crave the first glimmer of travelling in the light.
ReplyDeleteAnd Laurie the temperature will certainly be higher than Moscow! However its the wind and rain that can make a Scottish winter miserable. I suspect your winter weather may be nicer than here in Glasgow though!
I commented on Philofaxy this morning, but I will share it here too....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.largeformatphotography.info/sunmooncalc/
If you are photographer and I'm a keen amateur one... then the position of the sun is critical, this applies to Film and Digital... so this calculator is excellent. I've just printed off the Sun Rise and Sunset Times for my town here in France for the whole year, booklet printed they fit in to my A5 Filofax nicely. And if I do a particular month then I've managed to print to PDF then rescale it to fit in my Photography Filofax (personal slimline)
Yes I've seen that site Laurie, there's also http://www.flightradar24.com/ which does planes... very blank when you were London in April Laurie... ash cloud!