How Dark It Is

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3:00 AM during White Nights
When we arrived in St. Petersburg in June, we came just in time to experience "белые ночи" or white nights. On June 21, the sunrise was at 3:35 and the sunset at 10:25. In between those times, it doesn't even get totally dark, but is called officially twilight.


9:45 PM on a summer's eve
We never managed to stay up all night to witness this phenomenon, but we could hear the revelers enjoying their white nights at the bar below our temporary apartment. We did get used to using eye shades to make it possible to sleep through the hours of sunlight before we were supposed to get up.


Now we're at the opposite end of the length of our days. I have been known to get up, eat breakfast, wash dishes, wash clothes, and even bake cookies before the sun rises. You might think that I'm an early bird, but in fact the sun rose at 9:50 today and sets at 3:53.



The picture on the left was taken out our bedroom window at 9:00 in the morning. Nice bright sunny day, right? It's taken us a long time to get used to the long dark mornings. In fact, we're still not used to it. We take lots of vitamin D3 to try to keep us going during these days.

The shortest ones are still several days from now. By then sunrise will actually be at 10:01. The total daylight will be 5 hours and 53 minutes.


I guess we must be on the west end of our time zone to have such dark mornings. The sunset is pretty much what we're used to when we lived in Milwaukee, WI, but the mornings are so dark.


Maybe that's why we appreciate all the bright lights of the season that we see all around us in the city, but you'll see more of them in next week's post.

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