Shortest Day of the Year

So is 2012-12-21 the shortest day of the year?  The actual solstice occurs at different times in different years so I expect this varies.  For this year, looking at the web site timeanddate.com (two d's), which I found via Google…   (Sigh, the power just went out again!)

…It looks like it's actually 21 Dec, at least in Atlanta, GA.  This snippet of their chart shows sun rise and set times, and the length of the day.

Happy Winter Solstice!

At 11:12 UTC, 6:12 EST, 3:12 PST.

Fri 2012-12-21 11:12:00 +0000
Fri 2012-12-21 06:12:00 -0500
Fri 2012-12-21 03:12:00 -0800


In the picture, the sun makes it lowest trek across the sky on the winter solstice.   Winter officially begins.


Image credit:  From NASA/NES Teachers Corner

Happy Winter Solstice!

At 0:30 EST last night  (5:30 UTC).

Thu 2011-12-22 00:30:00 -0500
Thu 2011-12-22 05:30:00 +0000

These times are rounded to the minute, the seconds aren't really zeroes.

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

A bit belated, it was 5:05 EDT this morning .

Fri 2011-09-23 05:05:00 -0400
Fri 2011-09-23 09:05:00 +0000

Happy Summer Solstice

Happy summer solstice today at Tuesday at 13:16 EDT  (17:16 UTC).

Tue 2011-06-21 13:16:00 -0400
Tue 2011-06-21 17:16:00 +0000

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Happy vernal equinox today at 19:21 EDT  (23:21 UTC).

Sun 2011-03-20 19:21:00 -0400
Sun 2011-03-20 23:21:00 -0000

If You Think Today's Date is 1/1/11

You may be interested to note the time will be 11:11:11 in a few minutes.

In fact, if you have a precise clock, the time will actually pass through 11:11:11.1111...  at 1/9 second past.

I think today's date is  Sat 2011-01-01.  Granted, there are still a lot of ones!

Happy Winter Solstice

Tuesday 21 December 18:38 EST.   Yeah, that's tomorrow but I wanted to send this before I forget.

Happy Autumnal Equinox

Happy Autumnal Equinox Wednesday 22 Sep at 23:09 EDT.

Happy Summer Solstice

on Monday 21 June 2010 7:28 EDT (11:28 UT).

USNO
Wikipedia

RFC 3331 and Bash

I've mentioned ISO 8601 here.  As of yesterday, I've started aliasing the shell date(1) command to issue an ISO 8601, RFC 3339 format with the day of the week prepended.

Here's how date(1) normally looks.

Tue Mar 30 06:09:20 EDT 2010

With the bash alias

alias date="date '+%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z'"

The output looks like this…

Tue 2010-03-30 06:06:37 -0400

As you can probably tell, date and time stamps are a big deal with me.

Actually this mostly comes into play inside Emacs where I constantly use macros that insert date and time stamps.

Sadly, the latter format is one character longer than the other style.  The two-digit month is one byte shorter than the three-character abbreviation.  However, the time zone indicator -0400 is two longer than the three-character time zone abbreviation.  Ah well, the cost or progress.

Happy Vernal Equinox!

20 Mar 2010 at 13:32 EDT.