End of 2020 a little brighter, a little earlier than expected
Blink and you’ll miss it, or clouds might obscure the event for you anyway, but today’s sunset will be one minute later than it was on Tuesday.
While next Monday is the shortest day of the year, the afternoon light actually begins stretching out today in Kelowna.
The sun went down at 3:56 p.m. on Tuesday. It goes down today at 3:57 p.m.
“The afternoons are now getting a little brighter,” Kelowna astronomer Jim Failes said in an interview.
That’s a heartening celestial development, an earlier-than-expected lightening to end a dark year.
Total hours of daylight still diminish slightly because the sunrise happens a little later each day until Christmas.
Reasons why sunsets occur later in advance of the winter solstice are hard to explain, Failes says, but they have to do with the quickening speed of the earth’s orbit around the sun in the winter.
“It’s complicated,” Failes, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Okanagan Centre branch, said with a laugh. “Just enjoy the fact that now there’s going to be a little bit more daylight each afternoon.”
Sunrises will actually happen at their latest point in the day on Jan. 5, after which time it starts to climb over the eastern horizon a little earlier each morning.
Meanwhile, a recently downgraded weather forecast will bring good cheer to those who want a white Christmas in Kelowna.
While daytime highs will be several degrees above zero from today through Monday, a cooler trend then develops with highs only around -2 C in the days before Christmas.
With the probability of precipitation for those days at about 20 per cent, chances are whatever drains from the heavens will come to earth as snow.
Christmas Day is still forecast to dawn partly sunny.
At 7:55 a.m.