Moscow is how far north?!?

360  words, a bunch of tables
It’s pretty cold again.  Again I see the fact that I run like crazy in the cold.  Under 1:05 is easy except when the pavement is full of ice.

I looked at the website:  http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=166&month=3&year=2013&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1
 to find out the sunrise and sunset times.  Russia didn’t change clocks at the end of October—it’s amazing that in December, the sun did not rise here until 10 am.  Moscow is about 13 degrees of latitude north of Newell, Iowa where I grew up.  That’s about 1443 miles.  Using Google maps, I’ve estimated the distance that Moscow is north of Newell and it is extreme.  It looks like Moscow is about as far north as the middle of Hudson Bay if it were in North America.  I’m sure I could figure this out exactly if I had a good map, but I don’t.
     When I was a kid, we used to see the five-state weather forecast for Iowa, MN, SD, ND, and Nebraska.  I knew how terribly cold it was in Iowa, and I could see that in MN, it was colder, and International Falls, MN—right on the border with Canada was the coldest of all.  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in Canada!  Now, I’ve living 1000 miles NORTH of International Falls.   Ludicrous!

Moscow is on the left, Des Moines is on the right:

Moscow 

Des Moines

           Above you see the sunrise and sunset for 10 Dec thru 29 Dec 2012.  I know the days get shorter until the 21st, but I wanted to see if the sunrise might be later and later for some days.  I see here that it does, but only for a week.  A couple years ago, I looked at these times—I think it was in the spring.  I was amazed that sunlight increases something like 15 minutes each week.  I see here that the amount of sunlight increase depends on the time of year—makes sense.  During the week with the least amount of sunlight, Dec. 18 – 25, the sunlight stays nearly constant—it varies less than a minute the whole week.
Near the time of the spring and autumn solstices, the amount of difference is nearly 5 minutes per day.  So… from March 18- March 25, the day becomes over 30 minutes longer each week!


          I found a similar table for Des Moines.  As you can see, above, the amount of sunlight is over 2 hours more during the shortest days.  The fact that Iowa DID go off daylight savings means that the sun goes down earlier in DM.


Here are some other tables that may be of interest:

Moscow, June

 Des Moines--June

St. Petersburg,  June