View from the North 40: No time at the present

Ahhh, the third week in April, the days are noticeably longer, the birds of summer are returning and their primarily nocturnal enemy, the cat, is spending more nighttime hours outside. Spring is in the air. But I’m pre-obsessing over the coming sleep deprivation.

The longer daylight days are my only unhealthy relationship. I love that the sunlight burns away the cold and dark of winter, but so do the birds. They sing songs about it … all the time. That combination of light and sound is like Geneva Convention-level torture.

All it takes is the least little amount of light in the sky and those birds start in with the singing, chirping, chattering, cawing, rustling in the shrubs and through the dried leaves, and running around on my tin roof like they have tiny tap shoes on their feet.

The cat adds his two bits to my misery. Tired of being cooped up from winter, he is already spending most of his nights and days outside — but checks in with us randomly during the night, singing his song of loneliness, insisting on being let in to spend a little quality time before that pesky alarm clock takes me away. It’s a whole production with purring and kneading, with face-rubs for him and paws shoved in the face for me.

What does it mean to be pre-obsessed with this problem? It means research.

For instance, the internet has websites, like sunrise-sunset.org, that will tell you the time of sunrise and sunset in your area.

April 21, 2022, sunrise was 6:14:23 a.m., which is of course is 23 seconds after 6:14 in the morning, and twilight started at 5:42:15 a.m.

By May 21, though, twilight will begin 4:51:31 a.m. and sunrise will be 5:28:28 a.m.

By the time summer solstice rolls around June 21, my day will be 16 hours, 11 minutes and 53 seconds long, with twilight starting at 4:34:31 a.m., sunrise at 5:14:40 a.m., sunset at 9:26:33 p.m. and end of twilight at 10:06:42 p.m. This will give me roughly 6 ½ hours of sleepy-time darkness leading into the day.

This is a big fat misconception perpetrated by a technicality: How do we define twilight.

National Weather Service says we have Civil Twilight, which “begins in the morning, or ends in the evening, when the geometric center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon.” At this point of the day, the brightest stars and planets can be seen, but so can a lot of things around you without aid of a flashlight.

That ain’t dark of night. I know it, and those noisy birds know it, too.

Nautical Twilight is when the geometric center of the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon and you can kind of see things around you, but a flashlight is advisable.

Or you need bird eyes, or perhaps bird circadian rhythms, because many of our feathered friends are still making the most of the day, yammering away.

But then there’s also a thing called Astronomical Twilight which is when the geometric center of the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. We would call this dark, but until the sun is lower than 18 degrees, astronomers can see shiny objects in the sky, but not the fuzzy ones like galaxies and nebulas — because it’s not absolutely dark out … or what might more usefully be called bird-dark.

What’s this look like in numbers? Good question. Glad you asked.

Back at the sunrise-sunset chart we find that on June 21, Nautical Twilight begins at 3:34 a.m. and ends 11:06 p.m., and that means only 4 ½ hours of pretty much dark during the night.

But if you look at Astronomical Twilight — which starts at 1:27 a.m. and ends at 1:14 a.m. that day and virtually the same for a few days before and after the solstice — you will see that there is only about 15 minutes of a total darkness.

Fifteen measly minutes. The birds know it, and I know it because the birds won’t stop talking about it.

Many sleep-research sources about sleep debt — the difference between how much sleep you need and how much you get. For example, your sleep debt is two hours if you need eight hours of sleep but get six.

In terms of paying off my sleep debt from the summer, I would have to sleep during every hour of darkness in winter. This is not possible. I mean, sure I eat like a bear preparing to hibernate, but I don’t get around to actually doing it.

I’m racking up a huge debt, one that doctors say will be paid in hours taken off the length of my life.

So if my math is correct, I died five years ago.

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My math skills improve when I’m rested at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .