Changing sun angle brings stronger rays

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) - You've probably noticed the amount of daylight is getting longer. The sun doesn’t set now until around 5:30pm.

The first day of winter is the shortest day of the year and also the day where the sun's rays have the least strength in the northern hemisphere. Through winter and spring, the sun's rays get stronger.

"You can tell the snow that melts in the road after you've just washed your car and you go through somebody else's wash coming back from their car that definitely the sun is definitely getting stronger," said Christopher Gauthier of Waterford, Connecticut.

Many people think that we start to feel stronger sunlight because we get closer to the sun, but that's not true.

How warm we are on Earth has little to do with our distance from the sun, in fact in the northern hemisphere we are closest to the sun in the winter.

But it's not the small distance changes that affect the strength of sunlight, but instead the tilt of the earth toward or away from the sun that really matters.

"In the summertime we're tilted toward the sun so we get more direct sunlight. The sun arches higher in the sky and we get more energy and heat from the sun and longer days. In the wintertime the opposite is true," said Richard Sanderson who is the Astronomy Educator at the Springfield Museums.

The more direct the sunlight, the shorter your shadow.