Sunny Days

The sun is up in the mornings when I go to work! What a blessing. And it's up in the evenings even when I am done with my activities! It's interesting, because every year it seems the sun pops out from nowhere and lights up the world. The truth is that it gradually rises earlier and earlier, so why do we miss this? I mean, if you look at a calendar, the sun will rise about 1 minute earlier every day - sometimes two at most. So how do we find ourselves suddenly basked in this warm glow? I am not the only one who notices this - many people I have been around in the last week have commented on the sun's presence, and it seems this happens other springs as well.

When fall comes, it sometimes seems more subtle. I am always sad that even as early as August the long evenings of summer have grown short. At the very least, I think we make it all the way up to Daylight Savings Time (or the reversal of it) before we notice any drastic changes. (As opposed to Spring where the sun is SO out there, but I don't even know when Daylight Savings Time will start - the joys of having a cell phone!)

I just wish we had sun more often. I know God plans everything a certain way. But when I was in England (and to some extent Alaska) I was mesmerized by the sun's presence. It was the height of summer, and at 11:00 PM the sun was just starting to set, and the sky was fully light by 4:00 AM. The problem is that in the winter the opposite happens...I don't know the specifics on when the sun is up in English winters. In know in Chicago it set at 4:00 in November, so even earlier by the solstice. At the equator, the sun is out 12 hours a day and away 12 hours a day. Steady steady.

If I was rich I suppose I could follow the sun - and the heat - and go extreme north in the summer and extreme south in the winter. However, when I look at latitudes, I am thankful for where I do live. I am glad that we have the opportunity to have more than 12 hours of sun a day in the summer. I am glad that in the winter we aren't limited to five hours of it either. The sun and cold of winter combine to make it a season of rest - we are all sleepy and lazy, and to some extent this is a good thing. It is God's plan. When the sun comes back, we are re-energized to go again!

I did a study on my own and found that sunrise and sunset are affected almost equally by latitude and longitude. So when the sun sets early in Chicago, it also rises early, showing that the number of sunny hours a day are close to the numbers we get in Kansas. This shows that part of the difference is Chicago being farther east in the Central time zone. In my study, I looked at the sunsets in cities moving east across my time zone for a certain amount of miles (I did this on weather.com and mapquest.com to find zip codes. weather.com no longer has user-friendly postings of sunrises and sunsets - they are hidden). I then moved north in the time zone for the same distance. I found that the distance I chose (I think about 500 miles or so) made a 30 minute difference in sunrise based both on moving east and moving north.

I find this fascinating, because time zones are a man made phenomenon. We can change them based on political boundaries and widen some. But even within a time zone, sunrises and sunsets can be very different. Although I haven't looked up the difference, I would imagine sunrise in Chicago (northeast portion of central time zone) would be DRASTICALLY different than sunrise in Amarillo, TX (southwest). If this is the case, then our own personal expectations of how much sun there should be can be molded by where we live. Our routines can be affected, to.

So these are just my thoughts on the sun. Welcome back!