Brighter Days Ahead! Keep Those Heads Up!

Forgiveness is like sunshine after a rainy day.

-Anonymous

I am not sure who came up with that quote but it should help us all get through a murky, dreary Monday. We can expect plenty of forgiveness the next couple of days. We will easily be able to forgive nature with temperatures reaching near 50 degrees by Wednesday and we should have sunshine to work with the next couple of days. What makes November one of the darkest months of the year is the unsettled weather coupled with the short days. But we have brighter days ahead as you see above and sooner than most of us may think.

The winter solstice is actually December 22nd this year which will be our shortest day of the year. Of course every day is 24 hours, but I am talking about the all-important "daylight". Notice above you may not realize that we start gaining daylight in the evenings beginning December 14th. How is this possible? Well, we still lose more minutes of daylight in the morning than the evening all the way through the winter solstice. But the real key is sun-dial time does not always coincide with mean clock time, but can be up to about a quarter of an hour ahead or behind clock time depending on time of year . The earliest sunset occurs about nine days before the winter solstice, and the latest sunrise a similar amount of time after the summer solstice. The difference in time between the date of eariest sunset and latest sunrise is greatest in the lower latitudes as one approaches the tropics, and least as one approaches the arctic or antarctic circles. This all goes back to the cause of our seasons. The earth has a 23.5 degree tilt and it does not orbit the sun in a perfect circle but an ellipse.

At any moment in time, our reality is based on whatever we focus on."

-- Anthony Robbins, motivational speaker

Monty Sloan sent this picture in just in case you did not want to wait more than two weeks for brighter evenings. This is an incredible view of the Full Frosty Moon from Wolf Park this past weekend. The moon had a nice orange hue during moonrise. So this would be another nice thing to focus on. By late tonight bright moonlight is back in our forecast thanks to high pressure moving in and it could not come soon enough. Here are the latest rainfall totals from Sunday night and Monday:

This brings our November precipitation grand total to over 5 inches of rain at WLFI. We only average just over 3 inches of rain and snow. But there is a silver lining in the clouds. We had to look no further than the area skies yesterday afternoon. Raibows were spotted in the area on Monday afternoon from Oxford to Harrison High School. Ron Brose was kind of enough to send in another positive picture.

This rainbow was located in the north sky because the sun popped out in the southern sky. Remember you can have a rainbow in any portion of the sky. It all depends on what part of the sky you have sunlight popping out. Its light is reflected off the backside of raindrops so the sun would always be located behind you when viewing a rainbow. I hope I helped you through a less than desirable Monday. It will only get better from here. Tune in for more tonight and I will also have the latest on how all this rain will impact the Wabash River. Tomorrow we will take a closer look at what you can expect at the Lafayette Christmas Parade on Sunday. Have a great day!