The sun "rose" today at 5:55am, and will set at 10:01pm. (It actually came up over our mountains sometime after that. I'm pretty sure this sunrise time doesn't take the mountains into account.) We're still picking up 5 minutes of light every day! (That'll slow down as we get closer to the solstice, in mid-late June.)
Civil Twilight dawned at 4:59am this morning, and "dusks" at 10:58pm tonight. Between these two times, you can still do normal outdoor tasks by the light of the sky. The example I always give is mowing the lawn. (Or, if you were in Anchorage this past Friday, shoveling 18 inches of snow!)
Nautical Twilight dawn today was at 3:28am, and dusk will be at 12:25am. This is when you can see a good number of stars in the sky, but you can still see a glow at the horizon. (This was when folks at sea could navigate with their sextants.)
Now, this is the weird part: There is already NO Astronomical Twilight dawn or dusk, and there hasn't been for about a week and a half. As Wikipedia puts it, "most casual observers would consider the entire sky already fully dark" as of 12:25am tonight, but the 6th-magnitude stars and the diffuse nebulae and galaxies wouldn't come out until the nonexistant astronomical dusk. This is the harbinger of things to come...
Next Wednesday (May 7th), we'll lose our Nautical dawn and dusk, so there'll always been a visible glow on the horizon. Another month after that (June 8th), we'll lose Civil dawn and dusk, so there'll never be an excuse not to mow the lawn. Then it's just a bit less than 2 weeks later that we hit the longest day of the year: Sunrise at 4:20am, and sunset at 11:42pm. Even though sunset is already crazy-late (10pm), I still can't believe it's gonna get so much later. I just hope Maia can learn to sleep at night with the sun still up!
The good news in all of this is that Alaska-League Baseball is right around the corner! The season seems to run from the second week in June to the first week in August. I've already found the easiest bus route to the stadium, although we may just drive. The question is, who to root for? Anchorage has two teams: the Bucs and the Glacier Pilots. Do you choose by roster? By logo? By mascot? By theme song? Or do you just go to a few games and see who you like?
(Scroll down... for some reason the table is WAAAAAAAAAAAY down there.)
| Glacier Pilots | Bucs | |
| Roster | RHP Danny Sandbrink College: Stanford Hometown: St Louis, MO | OF Aaron Roberts College: SIU Hometown: Carbondale, IL |
| Logo |  |  |
| Mascot |  Piper the Moose |  Beekmin the Parrot |
| Theme Song | Unknown | Click Here |
| 2007 Record | 10-25 | 13-22 |
| Spelled Backwards | Go Tilop Reicalgs! | Go Cubs! |
I think I'm leaning towards the Bucs.
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