In a comment to my post yesterday, one of my ever-helpful readers suggested that I need to start getting ready for the "very long, very cold, very dark winter" in Minnesota. He's definitely right about the long and the cold, but some of you may be surprised to learn that Paris actually has fewer hours of daylight in the winter than Minnesota does. Why is this? If you study the map below or one like it, you may be able to find two reasons. (Native Observation: A Place for Learning!)
4 comments:
I like the Mercator projection, too.
So, when I was in school, when dragons roamed the land, when the earth was still flat, I learned about latitude and longitude. I understand that we are at 45N, and that Paris is farther north than that, and I understand what that means for the daylight fans.
But what's the other reason?
posted by Deb on behalf of a fictional anonymous old person.
Excellent answer, Fictional Anonymous Old Person!
To be honest, the second reason doesn't really affect the AMOUNT of daylight, just the timing of it. It's easier to discern this on a larger map of world time zones, so go here and zoom it up to 75 or 100%: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/reference_maps/pdf/time_zones.pdf. You'll notice that the Prime Meridian (aka 0° Longitude) goes not only through Greenwich but also right through France, just west of Paris. But as indicated by the color-coding, France is in the same time zone as most of the European continent (Continental European Time), rather than the Coordinated Universal Time (formerly Greenwich Mean Time) zone, which would be more appropriate based on its longitude.
So when it's 7 am according to the clocks in France, the sun is at a 6 am position. Which means that it stays dark until quite late in the morning in the winter.
Plus, it never snowed on October 26 in Paris, so it was darker because there wasn't all the white stuff in the air. Not that I'm complaining about the ridiculously cold autumn in my new home.
Yes, I thought maybe it would be about the position within the time zone.
You suggest it's bad to have less daylight in the morning, and more in the evening, and I'm a contrarian about that. Twilight is the best time of day. And I love darker mornings, made for sleeping well, even if we can't sleep in, unlike some households, where apparently the person who wakes up at 4AM is allowed to wake up the people around him. Or her, I guess, but not at the EWaC/G40 house.
I'm just saying.
I definitely prefer to have more sunlight in the evening than in the morning! But when the day is already as short as it is in Northern Europe in the winter, it's best to spread around what little daylight there is.
In Paris, I generally didn't leave the house before 9 a.m., and I really think it should have been mostly light out by then. And when twilight happens mid-afternoon, I'm not yet ready to enjoy it as the end of the day.
If I hadn't taken a vow not to bad-mouth my evil downstairs neighbor on this blog, I would tell Stories about being woken up at unreasonable hours of the morning, such as 7 a.m.
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