Early risers

We notice an asymmetry between sunrise and sunset.

It happens that one of our consultants is regularly up and active about dawn these days.  In a region where long commutes are the norm, and in the half of the year when the Sun is below the horizon longer than above, this is not very unusual.  We think, however, that noticing it is.

It’s obvious that in the Old Days when the Sun was the only significant source of light to work by that people would time their activities by its schedule.  One could extend one’s activity by reading a bit by kerosene lamp in the evening, but kerosene was not cheap for most people, and didn’t give enough illumination to plow the back forty.  A wood fire was more common, but reading by firelight is more a romantic idea than a practical one, and a fire has its limits for other indoor work.  An eight-hour slumber based on the Sun (centered on midnight) starts at 8pm and ends at 4am; the very strangeness of such a schedule nowadays shows how far we’ve moved away from that idea.

With the proliferation of artificial light and especially of work indoors, in principle we could have gone either way.  Rising at 2am and turning in about 6pm we would lose no daylight for most of the year, and no more than we do now with (for instance) a 6am-10pm schedule for the rest; but such a routine is highly unusual.  We almost uniformly operate later than the Sun.  The reasons for this are not clear to us, but must be very strong.

So our consultant had not much company observing the dawn.  At least, there were far fewer cars than on the jammed streets of his return around sunset.

And, we fear, few of either set were much aware of the hour.  To most drivers, sunset or sunrise are chiefly significant as signals to turn on or off one’s headlights.  We’d like to think that people do observe the world around them attentively.  But our tutoring consultant reports a long session trying to explain to a student just how the seasons happen, and that the Sun is higher in the sky in the summer, and lower in winter.  To us, this is elementary knowledge.  It would be obvious to anyone who spent time outdoors.  But it’s remarkably rare nowadays.

Is this important?  Well, we’ve talked before about how an awareness of the sky helps us place ourselves in the world, which we think is worthwhile.  And if you can’t see the sky for the buildings and streetlights, you can lose something without noticing it.  But mostly we’re thinking of something our astronomer said.

He would often be up all night at the telescope in Chile, on dry mountaintop (which is the best place to put a telescope).  The night was intensely dark, magnificent to see; the day was correspondingly brilliant with sunlight, hard and silvery in its bright glints.  But he came to value what he called the “pewter hour,” actually only a few minutes, when the sky was bright enough to see clearly but before the Sun had risen.  There was something about that gentle light that was calming and encouraging.

But you have to be up before dawn to see it.