5:22 a.m.

That's today, the 9th of the 10 days with the earliest sunrise time, 5:17.

I was there at 5:17, but the sun had not yet broken over the shoreline.



I don't have a view of the horizon. The first direct bit of sun became visible at 5:20:



You see why I picked 5:22 as the best. It wasn't because I was 5 minutes "late." I wasn't late! Were you?

At the Pre-Dawn Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

The photo was taken at 5:10 a.m. today, the 8th of the 10 days when the sun rises at 5:17, the earliest sunrise time of the year.

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I didn't think it would work...

... but you actually can point your iPhone camera directly at the sun.

To the eye, the sun looked perfectly orange and the sky was blue. The camera interpreted the sun as white, and that required the sky to be perfectly orange.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:20 this morning, the 7th of the 10 mornings with the earliest sunrise of the year — officially: 5:17.

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At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:19 this morning — the 6th of the 10 days with a 5:17 actual sunrise, the earliest sunrises of the year.

Here's how it looked — at my secondary vantage point — at 5 a.m.:



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"The scope of what some museums now call 'rapid response collecting' has expanded significantly in recent years."

"Curators often mingle with crowds, scoop up fliers and ask people to part with signs, or perhaps a piece of clothing. Such collecting has taken place at demonstrations around the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, and during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., after the death of Michael Brown."

From "Museums Collect Protest Signs to Preserve History in Real Time/Curators surveyed the area outside the White House on Wednesday for artifacts that will help record the emotional turmoil" (NYT).

They swoop in.

This morning, driving to the sunrise, at the turtle crossing, we saw birds picking over the smashed body of a plate-sized turtle.



I thought: How mean of the birds. But the birds didn't smash the turtle. Yes, but they delighted in the corpse.

Sunrise, 5:19.

The "actual" sunrise time was 5:17.

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Lake Mendota at 4:49 a.m.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

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What does a bird symbolize?

Sunrise, captured at its predictable time — it was 5:19 — with the sudden appearance of a bird. Seeing it only now, as I process this morning's photographs, I wonder what does a bird symbolize?

The internet answers most simplistically: Freedom!

Which cues "Ballad in Plain D"...

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?

ADDED: I have made a study of the birds of the Bible, and I have produced a list of 8 quotations, which I've ranked in the order that seemed right to me:

8. Matthew 8:20 — "Jesus replied, 'Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.'"

7. Ezekiel 38:20 — "The fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the beasts of the field, every creature that moves along the ground, and all the people on the face of the earth will tremble at my presence. The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will crumble and every wall will fall to the ground."

6. Psalm 50:11 — "I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine."

5. Ecclesiastes 9:12 — "Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them."

4. Job 12:7-8 — "But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you."

3. Psalm 102:7  — "I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof. All day long my enemies taunt me; those who rail against me use my name as a curse."

2. Matthew 6:26 — "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?"

1. Job 41:1-5 —"Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?"

Day 1 of the 10 days of the 5:17 sunrise — the earliest sunrise time of the year.

It looked as though it was going to be an overcast sunrise, with, at best, some bumpily textured clouds — a Type #2 sunrise. But as I reached my vantage point — 0.7 miles into my run — I saw I had "The Broiler" — Type #7!

I don't think I've ever reached my vantage point in time for one of these broilers. They tend to disappear by the sunrise time, so I catch them from my car window or the parking lot, or I make a quick stop and see them at my secondary vantage point. But today, I didn't know it was happening, because the sun is positioned so far north right now that I don't get an advance look as I'm doing the run. And then I caught the view at 5:16:



I presume it was broiling even more hotly a minute or 2 or 3 before that point, because it was fading fast. Here's how it looked a minute later, at 5:17, the "actual" sunrise time:



And one minute after that, at 5:18, it had calmed down into this:



A minute later it had descended into the Type #2 format that was all I had expected. The lesson is: If you want to catch The Broiler, get to your vantage point 5 minutes before the actual sunrise — even if it's the earliest sunrise of the year.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about anything you like.

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Sunrise, 5:19.

Actual sunrise time: 5:18.

Tomorrow is the first of the 10 days of sunrise at 5:17 — the earliest sunrise time of the year.

I woke up before the alarm this morning, so I've got myself trained to meet the sunrise. I am up for it.

At the Sunrise Café...

... say what you like.

Photo taken at 5:20 this morning. The "actual" sunrise time was 5:18, but the sun broke over the shoreline at 5:20.

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At the Western Sunrise Café...

... you don't have to look right at things.



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"I don't want to touch an object," I found myself saying, socially distancingly.

The sun was rising, and 3 young women...



... had asked me if I'd take a picture of them — the kind of request I've always happily agreed to. And here I was being stand-offish, in the manner of a person with OCD because they wanted to hand me their phone. It's covid19world, and we're all OCD now, so I couldn't go along with that, and I knew they'd understand. Actually, they'd probably have understood in pre-covid19world and simply regarded me as a person with a disability to be treated with empathy.

But in  pre-covid19world,  covid19world, and  post-covid19world, there is a solution to the problem of not wanting to touch the other person's phone. You don't need to refuse the lovely social opportunity to take someone's picture for them. It's AirDrop. Take a photograph on your own iPhone and AirDrop it to their phone. You just have to remember, and fortunately I did.

It was nice to encounter some young people, up for a 5:40 sunrise, experiencing our strange time with optimism. Nothing more optimistic than a sunrise.

The walk back from the vantage point had the sun at our back and the fading Flower Moon up ahead. I always love when Meade sings. He began "When the moon...." but it wasn't the "When the moon" song that I thought it was. There are at least 3 well-known songs that begin "When the moon...." Which is the first one that you think of? Two are optimistic but they take entirely different paths of optimism. The other one is sad. I don't know why the sad one is the one I thought of, such a sad old Depression-Era song...

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk 'til dawn.

The sunrise this morning was well-attended.

So many people out there at 5:45. The cloud cover was 0%, so it looked a way that I've seen many times. Type #3 I'll call it. The completely clear sky. Type #1 is a completely clouded sky, Type #2 is fully clouded but with some texture. The only other type I've identified is Type #5, which is distinctive, with a golden zigzag. I'll get to 10 types once I've seen the full annual cycle, which will be on September 8th.

Anyway, this is the open thread to get you through the night and onto the next sunrise. Keep watch.

Sunrise, 5:33.

Actual sunrise time, 5:43. This was the kind of sunrise that peaks 10 minutes before the "official" sunrise time.

At the Blue Stripe Café...

... you can talk all night (and shop through the Althouse Portal to Amazon).

The photo was taken at 5:49 this morning. The actual sunrise time was 5:45. I almost did not make it out to my vantage point. As I stepped onto the trail in the twilight, I heard the loudest, craziest crane noise I have ever heard. I kept going, the noise stopped, but then I saw — up ahead, on the hill about 20 feet away from the trail — 2 very large cranes standing side by side. They were not moving away. They had their territory staked out, and I was the intruder. I considered turning around and leaving, but I decided to keep going. Do cranes attack? I didn't think they were sandhill cranes, because I didn't see the red patch on their head, and they were strangely huge. But I've researched the sound of all the large birds at that location, and I have to admit that they were sandhill cranes, which I think of as friendly. But these things were spooky. I really did not trust them at all.

Ah, here is an article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette about the dangerousness of sandhill cranes:

Sandhills are big. They’re as tall as humans, with a wingspan approaching 7 feet.... Sandhill cranes are also delicious... “the prime rib of game birds” or “ribeye in the sky”.... Imagine a crumpled marionette suddenly springing to life as the puppeteer lifts its strings. Glenn’s crane [the crane Glenn shot] did that.... My brave friend now finds himself eye to eye with a fiercely angry bird, a bird with a foot-long rapier for a beak, a bird with an eagle’s talons, a bird now trying to pounce on my back-pedaling buddy.... I am standing now beside another crane [which] decides to re-enact the drama just played out. A scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds races through my head — the scene where the guy’s eyes get pecked out by seagulls. Only this is no itty-bitty seagull. It’s the bloodthirsty pterodactyl from Jurassic Park. Wilkerson screams again: “Shoot him! Shoot him!” And just as the demon is about to thrust his beak through my pounding heart, I do. Wilkerson had warned us. “Cranes can be dangerous,” he said. “Be careful how you approach birds, even when they look like they’re dead.” On another day... [a] man had [a] sandhill’s neck in a death-grip, but again and again the bird buried its knifelike beak in his face. The talons of one foot were embedded in the man’s arm; those of the other were locked in his thigh. Fortunately, the bird’s thrusting bill missed his eyes, but the hunter was frightfully injured and had to be transported to a hospital... I figured out then why there are no crane dogs to retrieve the birds. Imagine a Labrador or Chesapeake shish kebab. Picture your favorite hunting dog carried off in the talons of your game....