I've lived in many places, but never with latitudes even close to where I am now. Zaria (11° N) was close enough to the equator that I don't think I ever realized there was any difference to the length of days during the year. De Kalb (42° N), Towson (39.5° N), East Lansing (43° N), Oakland (38° N), and Mountain View (37.5° N), while having latitudes that span over less than 6 degrees, don't have vastly differing lengths of days in the winter. Edinburgh however, is going to be a new experience for me.
Over the past few weeks, we have been getting less and less sun. We get about 4.5 less minutes of sun each day over the last week, which may not seem like a lot, but when that translates to over 30 minutes of sun is lost in a week, it's something to think about. Today, we are scheduled to have a little over 10 hours between sunrise and sunset; in a week, it will be just over 9 hours and 30 minutes.
The sun makes it's way across the southern sky, seeming to move very fast, as shadows change a lot in a matter of minutes. The sun never comes close close to being "overhead", and it looks like perpetual morning or evening with the long shadows cast all day.
my long shadow at 12:30 on 21 October
the low-hanging sun casting long shadows at 1pm on 21 October
When we moved into this flat, the landlord told us that most of the windows faces the south, like it was a selling point. At the time, I thought "so what?". Now, I know. If our flat has a northern view we would never see the sun. Instead though, we get bright rays of sun (for a few precious hours, and only when it's not cloudy) in our flat.
I remember moving to De Kalb from Nigeria. I was prepared cold, as much as a 12 year old from Nigeria could be, I was not prepared for the darkness. I have the same feeling now; people say "are you worried about getting through the cold winter?" (not knowing I lived in Michigan for 7 years), and I say "not at all; I'm worried about getting through the darkness". I knew winter was coming when Lauren made the purchase I was dreading- she bought a SAD lamp. The darkness was coming.
According to this site, on December 21, the shortest day of the year, Edinburgh will have just under 7 hours between sunrise and sunset, from about 8:45 AM to 3:45 PM. That's kind of scary to me, and I'm not planning on being here on that day, but will be in town close enough to that day to wake up to darkness, lunch with a low lying sun, and dinner with darkness.
I'm already looking forward to the day when I start to dread summer, when the sun will never seem to set.
In Zaria, at 11 degrees north, we were south of the Tropic of Cancer, so the sun passed us heading north in May and then passed us heading back south in August, so we had two "longest days" in May and August, each longer than the summer solstice day of June 21. However, once the sun headed south for winter, our shortest day was still the winter solstice, though it was only 34 (11N + 23S) degrees south of us, so even that day wasn't very short. Thinking about the double "longest days" got me studying some celestial geometry when we lived in Zaria.
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