Enough about the winter solstice. When is the spring equinox in the Chicago area?

It’s dark almost 15 hours a day and temperatures will range from surprisingly warm to deeply unpleasant in coming months, but it’s never too early to think about spring.

Yes, the winter solstice will arrive in Chicago just before 9:30 p.m. Thursday, marking the astronomical change of seasons and the official point in the year when days start getting longer, second-by-second and ultimately minute-by-minute in the weeks ahead.

So when will the spring equinox take place?

Thanks to the leap year, the spring equinox will fall on March 19, rather than March 20. Officially, that equinox will hit at 10:06 p.m. Central time, according to NASA.

For those keeping track at home, Thursday will be the first of 90 days of winter that we’ll have to traverse to get there.

While popular wisdom says there are precisely 12 hours of daylight and 12 of darkness on the equinox, that’s not entirely accurate in the Chicago area.

According to Time and Date, the city will get approximately 12 hours and eight minutes of daylight on March 19, and sunset will occur just after 7 p.m.

Why the discrepancy? On the spring and fall equinoxes, the Earth’s axis is at its midway point on the planet’s revolution around the sun, tilted near toward nor away from the sun, resulting in a near-equal amount of daylight and darkness across latitudes.

The reason the Midwest gets slightly more than 12 hours of daylight on the equinox is because it takes the sun longer to rise and to set at higher latitudes than it does at the Earth’s equator, and as a result daylight lingers for just a few extra minutes.

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