Today, December 21st, marks the shortest day of the year in Ireland and the northern hemisphere.

Daylength in Dublin has shortened to just under 7 hours and 30 minutes today with sunrise at 08:38 and sunset at 16:08.

Although this is the shortest day, the winter solstice, sunset has been getting a little bit later over the past few days with today's contraction in daylight hours coming from a later sunrise.

From here the days will gradually lengthen even if, typically, our winter weather remains dull and grey for several weeks as the coldest months of winter are yet to arrive.

While spring traditionally begins in Ireland on the 1st of February, on Saint Brigid's Day, meteorological winter continues through until the 1st of March.

We have had some snow already in 2021 here in Ireland but most has now melted with warmer and wetter temperatures returning. In fact we had a 14C temperature change in 48 hours from -7 degrees Celsius to +7 degrees.

Typically we would see about a week of snow in the southwest, the warmest and wettest part of Ireland, to three weeks in the higher ground of the Wicklow Mountains and north midlands of Ireland. Away from the west coast essentially.

This post marks Panoramic Ireland's 500th blog post here on panoramicirelanc.com.

A year after treatment for cancer and I am still posting of photographic adventures throughout Ireland.

The image above is of Cork, the River Lee at night and Saint Finbarre's Cathedral. I photographed this fine scene for Eater, the world's most popular food website as part of their Where to eat in 2020 and Cork was one of the few cities in Europe to be on the list. Have a look at the images and Cork article here.