Sunrise, Sunset

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Winter Landscape with Pink House 1918 Lawren Harris

Now that we’re over the hump of the shortest day of the year, we feel a bit more optimistic and are looking forward again to the longer, sun-filled, plein air painting-perfect days ahead. But, as with so many anticipated good things, we must exercise some patience. The neat equation of subtracting the number of daylight hours on the winter solstice from the number of daylight hours on the summer solstice and dividing the difference by the 182 days between the two, isn’t accurate. In reality, the rate of increased daylight varies each day, starting out very slowly after the winter solstice and speeding up much later in the cycle.

To complicate matters, it is different at each latitude, so that the gain of daylight in Minnesota each day will be greater than that in Florida. This has to do with the 23-degree tilt of the earth’s poles to the plane of its orbital path around the sun. The best calculator for finding the …