The Year's Deep Midnight

When I was in London – back at the beginning of November – one of the friends I met up with there asked me if the days were noticeably shorter up north in Scotland. (I don't think of the UK as being particularly big, but what size it does have is all in its north–south length, so there actually is a significant latitude difference between southern England and northern Scotland.)

I said I hadn't noticed it yet, but I expected I would once the clocks changed. And indeed, as soon as we returned from daylight saving to normal/winter time, it was suddenly very noticeable how short the days were growing, with the sun setting in the afternoon.

At the solstice, the very shortest day, Aberdeen had only about 6 hours and 40 minutes of daylight (compared to, for example, New York City's 9 hours and 15 minutes), with sunrise at 8:46 am and sunset at 3:26 pm.

3:26 pm!

I didn't think to take any pictures on the solstice itself (I was holed up in the library, working on a huge assignment...as always) but here for example is the tail end of sunset colors, well after sunset itself, a little before 4:30 pm in mid-December:

And a winter morning sky, a little after 8 a.m., twilit but still half an hour away from sunrise:

I'd experienced the short-ish winter days in Berlin and I knew Aberdeen was further north than that (though I didn't realize at first just how much further). What I also didn't realize until recently is that Aberdeen is further north than Copenhagen! Yes, we've got a (very small) part of Scandinavia beat. And for someone who loves both Scandinavia and the strange, fascinating extremes of the seasons, that's rather exciting.

This time of year, I like to share John Donne's poem "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," which is so wonderfully dramatic about this darkest part of the year. I'm too late with it now, since the solstice is past (as well as St. Lucy's Day, which used to fall on the solstice before calendar adjustments), so I won't quote it all, just link it: "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day."