The universe doesn’t run on our clocks

Some things in life just don’t line up the way you’d expect. Like how toast always lands butter-side down or how your cat finds the warm laundry just as you are about to fold it. Or, this week, how the latest sunrise and latest sunset in Dunedin don’t happen on the shortest day of the year.

The solstice, our calendar’s solemn nod to winter’s peak, arrives at 2.41pm today. We’ll receive a paltry eight hours and forty-two minutes of daylight. But curiously, our latest sunrise doesn’t occur today — it’s lagging behind, not arriving until the 27th, almost a week later. Meanwhile, the earliest sunset was last week on June 15.

It feels like a trick. Something you’d expect from a celestial bureaucrat, shuffling papers, filing light and shadow in the wrong drawers. But there’s a good reason for it, and it has to do with the Earth being a bit of a show-off.

You see, our planet doesn’t orbit the sun in a perfect circle. It travels in a lopsided ellipse and spins on an axis tilted just enough to keep things interesting. Because of this, the apparent movement of the sun through our sky — the solar day — varies in length through the year. Some days, the sun gets ahead of itself. On other days, it drags its feet. Put another way, the clock time of sunrise and sunset is influenced not just by how long the sun is above the horizon, but also by how Earth’s speed and tilt shift the timing of solar noon each day.

Here in Dunedin, those subtle shifts mean our evenings began stretching out even as mornings continued to retreat deeper into darkness. It’s why, over this next week, you might notice dusk lingering a little longer than you’d expect. A small comfort as frost clutches the grass and breath clouds the air.

Still, I like these oddities. They remind me that the universe doesn’t run on our clocks. It runs on its own quiet logic. The sun keeps to a rhythm older than language, indifferent to school terms and committee meetings.

So bundle up, pour another cup of tea and step outside one of these crisp evenings. Even if the mornings are stubbornly dark, the light is coming back. Just not all at once.