All day long in Canada

Sunrise will be at 5:39 tomorrow morning – that’s 18 minutes earlier than back home in Merced (plus an hour if you consider that I’m in a different time zone; but let’s not complicate the matter).

Sunset, on the other hand, won’t take place until 9:21 tomorrow “evening” – compared with 7:59 in Merced. That means an hour and 40 minute more sunshine at this latitude ( 52 degrees, 32 minutes north) than in the Golden State (37 degrees, 18 minutes).

I would have to go much higher (up to about 66 degrees, north) to reach the point where the sun just doesn’t go down at all during parts of the Summer. That means northern Alaska, several hundred miles north of the apex of Interstate 2 and way past Anchorage.

Increased hours of sunshine don’t tell the complete story. Several of my new acquaintances here in Canada have remarked at how quickly it gets dark after sunset in the states.

It turns out that twilight is considerably longer, meaning that it stays light after the sun goes down and begins to brighten sooner before it comes up again. Because of the earth’s tilt, the sun takes much longer to sink far enough below the horizon up here. In fact, at this latitude, twilight never actually ends during the period near the summer solstice in June.

At the equator, twilight is over in less than a half-hour. Up here in Canada, it lasts all night.

I’m enjoying the long, long Canadian days. Winter might be a very different proposition.