High Noon

Living about 4 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle has its benefits. We never have total darkness during the depths of winter. Actually we get about 4 hours of sunlight at the winter solstice, and a good 2 hours of twilight on either side, adding up to at least eight hours a day with some brightness in the sky.

But the quality of light during the winter is very different from southern climes. The sky never gets more than a pale pastel blue in December and January, and the sun hangs very low on the horizon as it transits across a very limited arc in the sky.

The picture above was pulled from our airport's webcam at about 12:30 PM local (Eastern Standard), and you can see that the shadows are very long even at high noon. And my house is located at the foot of some relatively high hills, so we get only about an hour of actual sunlight streaming in through the windows.

The flipside is summer. We don't get 24 hour sunlight, but the twilights are so long we get 24 hour brightness for about six weeks. No dark, ebony skies, no stars, no northern lights. Just the moon, which seems enjoy the perpetual daytime.

Temperature aside, which would you prefer: the winter or the summer?