Tuesday, December 12, 2006
L asked me this morning when the shortest day is, which made me remember some research I did in September 2004 into sunrise and sunset times.
If you go to the US Naval Observatory's Astronomical Applications site, choose 'Data Services' > 'Table [...] for an entire year', and put in your location's coordinates (Cambridge is 52d 20m N, 0d 5m E), you'll get a table of sunrise/sunset times for the entire year. The times given don't quite match those on the BBC 5-day weather forecast for Cambridge—possibly because there's some rounding on the coordinates—but the trends are probably right. From the USNO data, you can see that sunset is earliest tomorrow, and sunrise is latest on the 30th. The shortest days are the 19th to the 24th.
If you go to the US Naval Observatory's Astronomical Applications site, choose 'Data Services' > 'Table [...] for an entire year', and put in your location's coordinates (Cambridge is 52d 20m N, 0d 5m E), you'll get a table of sunrise/sunset times for the entire year. The times given don't quite match those on the BBC 5-day weather forecast for Cambridge—possibly because there's some rounding on the coordinates—but the trends are probably right. From the USNO data, you can see that sunset is earliest tomorrow, and sunrise is latest on the 30th. The shortest days are the 19th to the 24th.
