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Tomorrow (or today, depending on how you look at things) is "Sun fast day". The Sun is early to the meridian (and all of its other appointments) today by 16 minutes and 27 seconds or equivalentally 4° 06.8' of longitude. During the next three months, the Equation of Time, which is the traditional name for the amount by which the Sun is fast or slow, relative to a true clock, will swing from 16:27 fast to 14:12 slow. Here in central Rhode Island, the Sun reaches the meridian, "high noon", a little more than half an hour before 12:00 o'clock zone time today (ignoring DST), while on February 11, the Sun will cross the meridian at almost exactly 12:00 zone time. That's a big change for three short months. 

The analemma graphs out the equation of time versus the Sun's declination for every day of the year. The shape is a tall, thin "figure-8". If you draw a rectangle around that figure 8, just touching the extreme points on the top and bottom and left and right, then tomorrow we are at the point on the extreme right edge of that box.

Reminder: analemma.com has lots of interesting material on this topic.

Frank Reed

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