I entered the sunrise and sunset times for 2010 into a spreadsheet to figure out when the earlies and latest sunrise and sunset are and the longest and shortest days. I used the calendars in
sunrisesunset.com as my data source and they are rounded off to the nearesiinute so you get strange things like 20Dec10 and 22Dec10 being the shortest days of the year while 21Dec10 is one minute longer. And while the shortest daylight ares on 20 & 22Dec10 the longest night, which you would suppose would be on the day with the shortest daylight, is on 4Dec10. But the longest day (6Aug10) is also thee shortest night. Earliest sunrises and sunsets always occur over a long string of dates (13-16Jan10 and 3-15Dec10 respectively) while the latest sunrises and sunsets only occur on one date each (6Nov10 and 6Aug10 respectively). And St Patrick's Day (17Mar10) will be the only day of the year with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.
I was all set to go up to Columbia University tonight for their lecture on micro-meteorites followed by public observing but as I sit here eating an early dinner the sky is overcast and NOAA is predicting that cloud cover won't drop below 20% until 2200 EDT. So I will probably fall asleep reading.
