Fall: The Dark Side
With equinox imminent, darkness the peak light-loss period has begun.
How autumn became known as "fall" remains unclear, but it is a wonderfully succinct definition of the season that will begin, astronomically at least, on Monday.
This is the season when the colorful foliage filters the oblique sunlight like so much stained glass, but it is also the time when things do, indeed, fall. And one of those things most definitely is darkness, something an old friend and colleague mentioned this morning.
Today, the time between sunrise and sunset is a 2 minutes and 36 second shorter than yesterday's, the biggest single loss of daylight of the year.
The distance between sunrise and sunset has been narrowing since the solstice, when the daylight hours remain almost unchanged from day to day.
The days will shorten by 2:36 daily until Oct. 2, when the interval will fall to 2:35. By the winter solstice, the daily changes will be negligible again, and then the days will grow again.
The biggest daily gain – 2 minutes and 38 seconds -- occurs on March 10. The seasons they go round and almost perfectly round.
For now, the daylight losses are coming at both ends, and the ugly news for all you high-schoolers out there who have to rise those early-morning buses is that starting Oct. 4, the sun won't be up before 7.
The loss of light, as we know, is a serious problem for those with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
And as we've noted, fall – not the holidays – is the time of year when we're most likely to pork up, the No. 1 season for calorie intake.