How much daylight will we gain in January? What are you doing to pass the time with more night than daylight? Pass the ideas along so all of us can do that too.

image from Pinterset 

           Weather update:  Temperature is 25 degrees at 7:45 AM.  Lots of clouds today and high of only 31 degrees.  Low tonight of 24 degrees.  NOT warming up much.  So my question to you, with our day light shorter, what things are you doing to make the time go better?  We aren’t having sun, we have more hours of darkness, so what are doing to help you keep busy?  Let us know.  Thanks. 

How Much Daylight Do We Gain After the Winter Solstice?
     Starting Saturday, December 23, the days will start being longer, and the Sun will be slightly higher up. We’ll start feeling greater warmth on our skin, too! Solar intensity depends on the sun’s height. But since the ground and the air take awhile to catch up we won’t reach our coldest average temperature until the third week of January, a full month from now.
As for things you can easily observe, the most obvious solstitial effect is that you can look out your most southwest facing window on Thursday and again Friday and see the Sun set at its leftmost position of the year. If you’re an early riser and see the Sun come up at around 7:15 AM, that will happen at its rightmost possible spot, in the east/southeast.
The matchup with our clocks is less clear-cut. We already had our darkest afternoon on December 7 and will not suffer our darkest morning, meaning latest sunrise, until the first week of January. This is thanks to the lag between the days’ variable lengths caused by our planet moving at different speeds in our orbit and the inflexible length of each clock’s minutes and hours.
       Let’s take a more relatable location in the Midwest, Chicago.
If you look at the Almanac’s daylight tool for Chicago, there are just 9 hours, 11 minutes of daylight during the week leading up to Christmas.
After this, daylight increases to 9 hours, 15 minutes by New Year’s Day.
By mid-January, the increase jumps to about two minutes a day.
By the 20th of February, daylight speeds up to three minutes per day! On the 20th, day length is 10 hours, 53 minutes and on the 21st, it’s 10 hours, 56 minutes.
In May, the increase slows back to two minutes gain per day
By the time we get to the summer solstice, the increase further slows to a minute a day; peaking at 15 hours and 16 minutes by the solstice.
Taken from https://www.almanac.com/how-much-daylight-do-we-gain-after-winter-solstice
Till next time this is Becky Litterer, Becky’s Greenhouse, Dougherty Iowa [email protected]  641-794-3337  cell 641-903-9365