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Today is the summer soltace, the first day of summer, the
longest day of the year. It's hard to believe that starting
tomorrow every day will get shorter. As a teenager I was a
bowhunter in Pennsylvania, and since legal hunting hours were
based on the sunset, the state of Pennsylvania published a table
that showed the time of sunset for everyday. I became well aware
that sunset varied by about a minute and a half each day.
Strangely enough I just now looked up the time of sunset for
Pleasant View, Utah and it is 9:05 p.m., while ten days from
now, on June 30, it will be one minute later at 9:06 p.m. It
also seems peculiar to me that if I watch the sunrise in
Salt Lake City (42 miles south of here) and wait until after sunset to return
home, my day of sunshine will be 4 minutes shorter than it is here. Then again,
in Anchorage, Alaska the sun rises at 4:15 a.m. and sets at 11:46 p.m., a
whopping 19 and a half hours of sunlight. But rumours of the sun not setting in
Alaska have been widely exaggerated. You have to go further north than Anchorage, at least to
the Artic Circle to see "The Midnight Sun" or "Continuous Day" or "Polar Day" (24 hours of
sunlight.) Only the northern third of Alaska is above that line (which is
about 195 miles north of Fairbanks.) The more you continue north of that line, however, the longer
you will miss your hours of darkness. At the north pole the sun will not set at
all for a staggering six months! Most places on earth have 365 days of night and
day every year, but at both poles there is just one big day that
is a full year long. The sun will rise and circle around you for
six months, at first low on the horizon, climbing higher and
higher until it reaches its high point in the sky during
the summer soltice. Then it will return, still circling you all
the way down until it disappears below the horizon, leaving you
in darkness for the rest of the year (or is it "the rest of the
day???")
In Argentina today is
their first day of winter and their shortest day of the year. I currently live
at 41 degrees north and wanted to see what city in the southern
hemisphere might have, in reverse order, winters and summers
similar to ours. Do you believe
that Christchurch in New Zealand,
and Puerto Nortt in Chile, are the only 2 cities in the whole world that are on
the 41st South paralell? Most of that paralell crosses oceans. And in case you
are wondering what happened to Africa, there is no point on the entire African
continent that is as far south as Utah is north, and therefore presumably
nowhere that is as cold in the winter as we are here. Speaking of which, don't
complain about our hot summer days, they are already getting shorter... winter
is on the way!
(Above Photo: The sun over the Great Salt Lake and Antelope
Island. I used film (Fujichrome 50) and a colored filter. In all
of my thousands of images, I only have two in which I have used
a colored filter, and this one I have only published because I
felt that it went best with my story of "The Midnight Sun". I
never use colored filters at all any more, they usually look too
phony and unnatural to me. Many of the sunsets that other
photographers paste in or use Photoshop to create, also look
contrived to me.)
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