Our Solstice Day

Got a photo of the sunrise from my deck. It was at 10:38 am precisely 33 minutes after our official sunrise. A function of my elevation (420 msl) and the 4000’+ terrain across the bay. Cloud cover permitting, the sunset should be much closer to the official time as it will have no terrain in the way.

Sunrise, right over Sadie Cove.

Our official day today will be five hours fifty nine minutes. Civil Twilight (the time when the sun crosses 6 degrees below the horizon ) began at 9:08 am this morning and ends at 5:00 pm this evening. That is what the FAA recognizes as the ending and beginning of “legal night”.

So you could reasonably expect to conduct normal daytime activities for almost eight hours today. If you really want to impress the geek crowd, throw out the terms Civil Dawn, Nautical Dawn and Astronomical Dawn, but you really ought to look them up first.

Google says that the horizontal angle from sunrise (140 degrees SE ) to sunset (220 degrees SW) should be 80 degrees but I suspect it will be less due to the terrain blocking the first 33 minutes of the sun’s travel above the horizon. The math would suggest a difference of around 72.64623955…….. degrees. Check me out on that, I’ve been known to be wrong. Anyway, I’m going to plot it on a good map and see if it checks out.

I’m having way too much fun with this. No THC, honest. Just mighty happy these days.

Here’s the sunset a little behind the trees, and a wide angle that shows the sunrise and sunset points.

The time stamp on the top photo shows 4:07, so I think I can use the 220 degree bearing that Google had. The sunrise was just over the rear end of the red truck in the house across the street. It didn’t get very high. I might get an opportunity to take one from the same spot tomorrow at noon. If I do I”l post an update.

Here’s the update: High Noon 3 days after Solstice. It just gets higher until the equinox.

We now return you to your previous post………

In between, we had a 6.0 earthquake across the Cook Inlet at 2242 UTC , located at 60.122 N 153.212 W or pretty close to Mt. Illiamna. I can’t see Mt. Illiamna from my deck as it is just around the corner. It did give us a good jolt, however. There were no tsunami warnings issued. I’ll be looking for some steam venting from Mt. Illiamna on my drive to Soldotna this Thursday.

The weather should be perfect for it!

Stay safe and warm.