Here comes the sun

That’s right in the last few days, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the sun has made its first tentative appearance in the often hostile Yorkshire sky. Hurrah! Now I know that this is England, and I know that I am being highly delusional in ignoring the fact that it rains about one day in three in England, but I’m sure that there were summer holidays in the good old early nineties when it didn’t rain once for a whole eight weeks. This can’t just have happened to me, can it?

So I thought that if we were going to encourage the sun to enter into our lives then we should perhaps learn a little bit more about it, to make it feel welcome you understand. The first interesting thing to note about the sun is that it’s massive: it makes up 99.8% of the mass of our solar system having the mass of 330,000 earths, and its equatorial circumference is 109 times that of the earth. It’s also brighter than 85% of the stars in the galaxy, most of which are apparently red dwarfs.

What I didn’t know about the sun is that because it’s so hot it’s actually white. We see it as yellow because the blue parts of the light it gives off are scattered as the light enters the earth’s atmosphere – which is why the sky looks blue. It takes light from the sun 8.31 minutes to reach earth which I’ve retained in my brain because my GCSE physics teacher used to tell a room of scientifically challenged 15 year olds that if the sun exploded we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes; cue eight minutes of classroom silence, which was perhaps his aim.

Sadly we’re not particularly well placed in the country to make the most of what the sun is offering. The sunniest parts of the UK are on the south coast because clouds form over land whereas it’s rarely cloudy out at sea. The sunshine record according to the met office was set in Eastbourne in Kent in 1911 when they enjoyed 383.9 hours of sunshine in a month. Depressingly in December 1980 Westminster received no sunshine at all.

High Mowthorpe is our closest met office weather station and the average figures for 1971-2000 show that our sunniest month is likely to be July with an average 179.5 hours of sunshine which with the roughest dividing is about 6 a day. Not bad, especially when you consider it’s more like 1.4 hours in December. Obviously it’s important to remember that the sun contains harmful UV rays and you should always wear a high SPF but I for one will be out there worshiping just as soon as I find some suitably glamorous sunglasses.

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