My street, 12/13/10.

Sunrise 10:49 am. sunset 2:41 pm for a 3 hour, 52 minute day and a maximum solar elevation of 2.3 degrees–a little more than 4 solar diameters. It’s cloudy, so the sun isn’t visible anyway. Theoretically it’s snowing, and there are ice crystals in the air–I saw them on my windshield when I went down to pick up the mail. But the snow stake is stuck on 10″–made up the settling from the ice storm, but not enough snow to push it on up. Temperature -10 degrees F which is quite seasonable this time of year.

Days are still getting shorter, but the loss–now 2 3/4 minutes a day–is rapidly decreasing. A week from now it’ll be half a minute, and two days after that we start gaining! The first day of winter? In theory, but for us it’s the great turnaround of the year. No wonder the solstice or near it is a major holiday for just about everyone.

That’s a color photo, by the way. It’s a very gray day.