Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning between 6:30 and 7:00 Eastern. Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the autopublish feature you can set it and forget it. Quite often the diarist du jour shows up much later, that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Just let us know in the comments. You can click on the Morning Open Thread "heart" if you'd like us to show up in your stream every day.
When I first started following Morning Open Thread regularly, 6:30am Eastern was 5:30am Central (well, it still is but my point of reference is 5:30am). So it was light out. The sun was up or starting to come up and it was not even necessary to turn on a light.
But something happened ... the axial tilt of the earth.
|
|
Around the 22nd of April, sunrise was 6:00am so dawn started filtering in early enough to cast a warm glow over the Morning Open Thread. By the 16th, the sun was officially up at 5:30. There was plenty of energizing sunlight and lifegiving coffee to take a break from work and see what was going on at the Great Orange Satan. MOT engaged ... threading started ...
|
Then, towards the end of July, the sunrise was noticeably later (5:42) and the MOT was again becoming shrouded in darkness. More coffee was needed to get into the threads with any kind of coherent comment (okay, okay, not every comment is coherent). By the middle of September, the sunrise was not until 6:30am and any threading clearly needed artificial light.
|
On December 22nd at 05:30 UTC (or 00:30 CST --- also known as "when I am sleeping") the axial tilt will be the farthest away from the sun that it can be and sunlight will begin returning. It will be four months before the early morning light filters in on the Morning Open Thread but the hope starts that day.
|
So in the meantime, let me turn the light on for you.
|
|
|
Okay. Now you can Jibber Your Jabber