Friday, September 22, 2006

How do you like your eggs? - Sun-up and sun-down in Ronneby

Given it's the autumnal equinox today, I started thinking about how bad it's going to be when I leave here in 3 months' time, at the winter solstice. So I went searching for some sunrise and sunset times on the net. I could find quite a lot for Perth, but not much for Ronneby. One of the niftier sites was gaisma.com, because they give you a graph of the daylight and darkness hours for the whole year. For instance, the one for Perth is http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/perth.html and you can see how quasi-horizontal the daylight part looks. There is not heaps of difference between winter and summer. Unfortunately, there is no page for Ronneby. However, there is one for Karlskrona, which is about 20km east of here, so an adjustment of a minute or two will make it comparable. The page is at http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/karlskrona.html and you can see the different shape of the graph. Depending on when you view the page, the figures will be updated. So, I'm copying the figures here to preserve them. Today, there is actually 6 more minutes between sunrise and sunset here in Ronneby than in Perth, which I thought was neat considering it's the equinox. But then the bad news hit me. We lose 65 minutes of daylight compared to now in two weeks' time, 138 minutes in 1 month, and by the winter solstice, there are less than 7 hours between sunrise and sunset. In an effort to cheer myself up, I tried to find a place with worse conditions. For example, LuleƄ in the north of Sweden, where on December 22 their day will be only 3 hours and 7 minutes long. Of course, nothing compares to the Amundsen-Scott Base in Antarctica, which experiences four months of complete darkness and more than five months of complete daylight every year.
By the way, the picture in the 'Links' section is a Weatherpixie. I added it recently. It allows you to instantly see what the weather is like here at the moment, including the temperature, wind and humidity. If you want a more accurate description, you can click on the web camera link, which shows a view of the town square.