5:53 a.m.

 

The official sunrise time this morning was 5:41. Earlier today, I posted pictures taken at 5:35, 6 minutes before sunrise, when things looked much redder — as if some horrible disaster were taking place on the opposite shore. But this photo, 12 minutes after sunrise, is mellower, the red replaced by gold. 

The season of the days of the longest light has just begun. Picture the summer solstice in the middle of a 3-month period and you'll see that we're just entering this period. This is something I talked about — squirreled away in the comments — on March 7th of last year:

We're in the part of the year when day and night are balanced. It's already almost 12 hours between sunrise and sunset — and of course the light begins before the actual sunrise time and lasts after the sunset time. It's still winter, and it was a bit cold this morning, but the light is now completely spring.

I think the seasons are wrongly divided. They shouldn't begin with an equinox/solstice, but should have the equinox/solstice put right in the middle. That would correspond to how I feel about the seasons: It's about light, not temperature. Winter should have the solstice as its center and should end by mid-February and so forth.

Using that terminology, I'd have to say that summer has just begun. Perhaps it's better to pick different names, with the season that begins now called Light.

As I write this post, it's 7:58, and the sun hasn't set. Sunset time is 8:06 p.m. today, so I'm looking out on sunset colors, though not from a great vantage point.

FROM THE EMAIL: John writes: 

[I]n Ireland, the year is divided differently than here in the states. The winter months are November, December, and January; the spring months are February, March, and April. May, June, and July make up the summer; and, of course, August, September, and October are the autumn. The Irish names of September and October mean, respectively, “Middle of the harvest” and “End of the Harvest.” 

Now, Ireland is much further north than us and has a much greater variation in the amount of daylight between midsummer and midwinter, so such a way of ordering the year might make more sense than the way we do it here. I’d say it definitely makes more sense than defining summer by bracketing it between two federal holidays!