CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Have you noticed? The amount of daylight has been getting longer since the first day of winter. Okay, maybe we are exaggerating slightly, but we have gained about 14 minutes since Dec. 21.
But we are now officially starting to see our sunrise times start to get earlier as well.
We can be honest, winter often seems like it drags on. It’s colder and the days are shorter. But it's about this time of year we start adding daylight to our days at a quicker pace.
The shortest period of daylight of the year, or the Winter Solstice, has a day length of about 9 hours and 47 minutes. That differs from the first day of Summer’s day length by about 4 hours and 45 minutes.
But here's something interesting: the earliest sunset and sunrise times happen well before and after winter starts.
Our earliest sunset time happens during the first week of December, and the latest sunrise time of 7:33 a.m. just happened.
But why? It comes down to two factors.
- Because Earth is tilted.
- Because of its elliptical orbit (an orbit not in a perfect circle) around the sun.
This creates a difference between solar noon -- when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky -- compared to what we see on our watch or clocks.
This may sound a bit complicated -- but look at it this way: if you were to take a picture of the sun at the same time and location every week and made it one image it would make this Figure 8 pattern. This is called an analemma.
The Earth's changing axis causes the view we see the sun differently. The bottom broader part is the sun's position change around Winter.
When the sun is at its lowest angle, that is when we see our latest sunrise time. This is where we are now.
But going forward, we will now continue to decrease our sunrise times faster and faster through the rest of winter as the sun's position climbs around the Figure 8.
So, for the rest of January, our sunrise time will get earlier by 8 minutes and we will gain about 27 minutes of daylight -- we are on the up and up.
