I was looking at my calendar and noticed that the Winter Solstice is coming up Dec 21. Then I noticed that the time of sunset on the solstice is not the earliest  amongst the days nearby. And the time of sunrise is not the latest. Indeed, looking over the various sunrise and sunset times, it turns out that the earliest sunset was in the period of December 3-10 – 16:37  in Colorado Springs – and the latest sunrise occurs from December 31 – January 10 – 7:18. But the Solstice is still the shortest day, longest night of the year. (9:26, 14:34 hrs). Most peculiar, one would intuitively think that the shortest day would have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset.  Something was wrong and I needed to find out.  So I went to Google.  

It turns out that others have noticed this phenomenon before and have an explanation of it. I like this explanation – he said analemma. The US Naval Observatory was not quite as detailed but did summarize it nicely- Declination and The Equation of Time.

I still have a hard time visualizing the spacial relationships. What I need is a picture – no… no…  doesn’t help…