11 SECONDS AND GAINING

Big news in Anchorage today. We’ve gained a whole 11 seconds of daylight since yesterday’s winter solstice (the shortest day of the year). For Lower 48 readers (if any) of this blog, 11 seconds more daylight is a big deal in Alaska.

Today in Anchorage, the rosy fingers of dawn peeped over the eastern horizon at 10:14 AM this morning, and won’t go down in the west until 3:42 PM. Wow! That’s a whole 5 hours, 28 minutes, and 11 seconds of heart warming daylight. That’s much better than yesterday - but not as good as tomorrow.

Actually the sun rises more to the southeast, hovers to the south during the day, and sets in the southwest because our far northern latitude - thereby enabling Alaskans to “look down” on the Lower 48.

Whatever, Anchorage has more winter light than Fairbanks, and Barrow which has zero daylight this time of year. Have a bad winter night in Barrow, and you’re talking a long, long, time.

In the spirit of fairness, I should report that Alaska's capital city of Juneau has more winter daylight than Anchorage. But so what? No one down in Juneau hardly sees the sun anyway, whatever the time of year, due to incessant rain.

The next “headline of light” will be when we “spring forward” our clocks this spring - it doesn’t change the number of daylight hours, but it surely seems like it. The bottom line? Light adds my natural sunny disposition.