CENTRAL NEW YORK (WUTR/WFXV/WPNY) – You might have noticed we’re slowly gaining more daylight during the evening hours. Our current sunsets here in CNY are just before 5 pm though that will change as we head into this weekend with our first sunset at 5 pm expected on Saturday.

Just one month from now, we’ll have our sunsets after 5:30 pm! We will continue to see later sunsets until the end of June when sunsets will start to become earlier. 

One fun fact you might not know about sunsets however is that when we see the sunset, it’s not actually on the horizon anymore! You can still see the Sun even after it has technically set below the horizon because of light bending through our atmosphere in a phenomenon called refraction.

When light moves from a less dense to a more dense substance, like air to water or from a less dense layer of the atmosphere to a denser layer, it bends towards the normal—an imaginary line that is perpendicular to the surface of both media. The opposite occurs when light moves from a denser to a less dense substance. This is what’s responsible for a variety of optical phenomena including rainbows, mirages, halos, and sundogs.