5 November 2016

Goodbye Daylight Saving Time, hello dark and gloomy evenings

Mountain Standard Time returns early tomorrow morning, and we’re condemned to its early sunsets until Daylight Saving Time returns on 12 March 2017. Not everyone shares my love of DST: see today’s post at Logicosity.

There are numerous sunrise-sunset apps for smartphones and tablets. Unless I’m in the field, where I use my GPS receiver’s sunrise-sunset function, I use a sunrise-sunset-civil twilight table I calculate using algorithms used by the U.S. Naval Observatory. You can download a spreadsheet with these values for 6 November 2016 through 11 March 2017 for Flathead Electric’s Stillwater solar array. Because the algorithm assumes a flat horizon, you’ll need to time a few sunrises and sunsets to determine a local correction.