There were some spectacular sights as the sun rose and fought back the mist over the Arun Valley. The views were filled with colour experiments too as the pinks and oranges of the sky rose in a crescendo that battled with the whites and greens closer to the ground. In the end the orange clashed too grossly with the yellows of a field of rapeseed and I had to look away.

Yesterday afternoon I received the following email from a young navigator called Luke Hardy:

This Saturday, just gone, myself and two friends went on our local walking competition – the Charnwood Hike.  The aim is to complete the 20 mile hike in the fastest time possible. (you are allowed to run)  Unfortunately it is in the hike’s rules that we must take a map and compass.  There are various checkpoints along the route.  We were awarded points for speed and map reading- I’ve finished reading your book by now- so at the check points we showed our map reading skills to the officials, found the direction in which we had to travel (eg.SE) and, with a bit of persuasion, we put the map in David’s bag- when the officials weren’t looking- and set off looking for natural clues.  David and Sam (the two friends) were completely inspired, especially when they found that we got a better score this time than when the map was used last year. I told my two little converts that if they want to see the book they have to buy one – so there is another two sold!  I could have let them borrow it, but I have two nicknames for my copy already, “second holiest book” and “the fourth emergency service”.

What an email to receive, but take care Luke!

My plans this morning, as announced in the Telegraph, were to head to the top of a hill and catch the sun rising due east. Sadly, the air is cooler than its dewpoint… the humidity is greater than 100%… there is a low level of nimbostratus… however you want to put it: the weather is not very good and the visibility is terrible.

Had I been able to see the sun it would have risen due east. The vernal and autumnal equinoxes being the only two days of the year when the sun rises due east.

Something that you cannot notice on any individual day, but only by studying the sun’s rising position over the course of a year from the same location, is that its rising and setting positions are changing by more at this time of year than at any other time. Near the solstices the sunrise position slows its change to close to a ’standstill’  (the name ’solstice’ being derived from the Latin for ’sun standing still’). At the equinoxes, in the UK, sunrise direction changes by nearly 5 degrees in a week.

The other thing that is changing very rapidly at this time of year are sunrise and sunset times, and therefore the length of the day. At the equinox everywhere on Earth shares a roughly equal day and night (the word comes from the Latin for ‘equal night’). Here in the UK, the day will be half an hour longer one week from now than it is today. This may be why we can sometimes feel ’stuck’ in winter, but that when we feel the season turning and spring coming it is not a gradual shift, but more like a revolution. That said, it doesn’t feel very spring-like out there at the moment.

A good website for looking at sunrise and sunset times in the UK can be found here. The best one for checking the bearing (direction) of sunrise or sunset anywhere in the world is the US Naval Observatory.

The original plan had been to drive up to a semi-secret location in the South Downs and take a picture of the sun rising in what were originally forecast to be clear cold skies.

Yesterday morning I was driving the four miles from home to the gym but all four wheels of the Land Rover Defender lost traction on black ice and I slid headfirst into a substantial tree at about 25 miles-per-hour. I walked away from the car-and-tree amalgamation and felt very lucky to be in much better shape than either. My next thought was that my wife and kids were due to set out on the same road an hour after I had. My mobile phone was on charge at home. I ended up having to run home, cross-country in snow and as fast as I could, in order to get to them before they set off in a car that would have found the conditions even more lethal. I know the local country quite well, but had to take the most direct route home, something that I had not had to do from that area before. The sun was up and I made my way through woods and fields and over fences in a straight line home, obviously no map, compass or GPS involved. I got back just in time. The car was picked up later by a recovery garage, I have yet to hear whether it will drive again.

I was still keen to get a shot of the winter solstice sunrise, but without a car made a plan and laid out my clothes and boots last night. When I got up at 6am, the weather had deteriorated and cloud dominated. Still, it’s good to be alive at this moment that has been celebrated since prehistoric times!

This photo is taken looking southeast. The setting sunlight can be seen bouncing off the northwestern edges of the clouds.

With experience it is possible to tell that this moon is two days off a new moon, which means that it will rise two of my fist-widths (24 degrees) ahead of the sun. The sun travels through the sky at just over a full fist width (15 degrees) an hour. It was therefore possible for me to gauge that the sun would rise in about one and half hours just by looking at the low moon in a dark sky.