It’s a dark, rainy Autumn day here in Northern Georgia. This is the last Friday of 2006 on Daylight Savings Time. Tomorrow morning will still be DST, but Sunday morning, just two days away, will be Standard Time.
Currently it’s fairly dark still at 8am –> the Sun comes up between 7:45am to 8:00am of late.
We “Fall Back” in the Autumn for the “time change” which occurs at 2am Sunday (morning, but middle of the night, seems like Saturday night for folks awake at that hour 😉 )
So Sunday morning, let’s pretend that the sun comes up at 8:00am, pretending that the time is still under DST, no time change. How much time from midnight to 8:00am? 8 Hours, of course.
Now let’s put the Standard time process into the works:
It’s Midnight, Sunday, October 29, 2006. At 2am it’s suddenly 1am again.
At 2am there were two hours used up of the eight from Midnight to Sunrise time. So at 2am there are 6 hours until Sunrise. When we put the clocks back at 1am we do not pull the sunrise back or push it forward, it’s not involved in the “time change” of course, it’s organic. Time is real, but “man’s time” is particular to man. It’s something we measure, we create the tools to measure it.
With that sudden change the sun comes up at 7am to man’s way of thinking in Standard Time, giving us the morning back, for now, though it will get darker and darker as the days creep closer and closer to the Winter Solstice (in late December,the 22nd, the darkest ‘day’ of the year–meaning: the least amount of daylight in the day, or the most amount of night in a 24 hour day.)
I do not like “digital” time to go by in life (it does have it’s modern purposes, but for me in life generally, it’s a bane like no other. I prefer analog, and would prefer a Sun Dial over that, and just live by where the sun is overhead or on the horizon, and get to know the stars and planets better and understand their rise and set and movement in our sky to gage night “time” awareness … but I digress.)
This whole “time change” thing is agrarian and many people today wish to do away with it, I do think. I do not wish to, nor do I wish to not. I have no feelings about it. I know it has use and since it’s in place, we should go by it, and it DOES have some sort of value in “shocking” people in the Spring and Fall, at the least. 🙂 I truly mean that, so many take nature for granted, or totally ignore it, blot it out of their lives. Which is very sad.