winter-cope
At the height of a London summer, you remember why it's the best city in the world, conveniently forgetting those winter afternoons when darkness descends at three o'clock.
October begins with sunset near 7pm. After the clocks go back one hour at the end of month, daylight ends at 4:45, you internalise it, this is winter in London, the next time you’ll see daylight at 7pm is April.
There are arguments both for and against Day Light Savings that I sympathise with, but the constraint is unmoveable, the total amount of daylight is ~7h per day in the winter. Worse still, the total sunlight in London is the lowest amongst the major cities of the world. 52 hours of sun across the entire month of December, you can go days without seeing the sun.
You could leave, go on vacation to somewhere sunny.
Or you could use some copium:
Solstice, from the Latin sol (sun) and sist (stand still) was coined by the Romans who noticed that during this period, the sun seems to stop moving day to day. There’s also the equinox (equal-day/night). The equinox happens on a date in between the two solstices.
Summer solstice: 21 June
Autumn equinox: 22 September
Winter solstice: 21 December
Spring equinox: 20 March
If you imagine the sun slowing down and stopping at the solstices, it’s pretty easy to infer that the sun moves fastest at the equinoxes. Like a pendulum.
Now for the cope – After summer solstice, the amount of daylight decreases each day until winter solstice, the rate of the decrease is fastest at the equinox, on the autumn equinox, about 4 precious daylight minutes are lost the next day.
What this means is that after the equinox, the rate of decreasing daylight time will begin to slow down! Each day does become shorter, but it gets less shorter than the previous day.
And the rate of it getting less shorter accelerates!
This second order math is not for the summer time when you will be out touching grass, but in the winter you can see for yourself:
0% : Sep 22, -4.06 min/day
25%: Nov 12, -3.05 min/day (took 50 days)
50%: Nov 28, -2.03 min/day (16 more days)
75%: Dec 9 , -1.02 min/day (11 more days)
100%
The first 25% reduction took 50d, the next 25% reduction was three times faster!
Is this type of accelerating progress not interesting to you? Every day is an even greater improvement! Wow.
Until the sun begins to slow down towards the solstice, but we get to see total daylight increasing so soon after that anyway.