Land of the Mid-Day Dark

British Summer Time ended on October 30, a full week before daylight savings time ended in the U.S. The effect was immediately obvious -- it gets dark really early here!

Nottingham is at 53 degrees north latitude. For points of reference, that's as far north as Akiminski Island in Hudson Bay, the north end of Lake Winnipeg, Umnak Island in the Bering Sea off Alaska, or Barnaúl, Siberia. Only the Gulf Stream keeps Britain warmer (and wetter) than those places.

It's not exactly the Arctic Circle, or "The Land of the Midnight Sun," but we're getting up there toward where the tilt of the earth becomes noticeable.

When we arrived here in June, the sun rose at 4:39 a.m. on our first full day in the country, and set at 9:34 p.m., giving us just four and a half minutes short of 17 full hours of daylight. A long day. Decorah had just over 15 hours between sunrise and sunset that day.

On December 22, the shortest day of this year for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the sun will rise here at 8:16 a.m. and set at 3:50 p.m. for just seven hours and 34 minutes of daylight! Native Brits tell us it gets downright depressing.

By way of comparison, Minneapolis will see a sunrise at 7:48 a.m. on December 22, and a sunset at 4:34 p.m., for eight hours and 46 minutes of daylight -- a full hour and 12 minutes more. Des Moines will see nine hours and 10 minutes of sun that day -- an hour and a half+ more than Nottingham.

This week we are just slipping to fewer than nine hours of daylight each day (about what Iowa will see mid-December), with sunrise around 7:15 a.m. and the sun going down around 4:15 p.m. On cloudy, foggy days (have I mentioned that we have some of those in England?) it already gets noticeably dark around 2:30 in the afternoon, and we have to start turning on lights around the house.

By December we may be using lights at noon.