Physicist: The issue here is the equinoxes are the two days of
the year when the length of the day should be exactly as long as
the night. And yet you’ll find that on the equinox the day is
always slightly longer than 12 hours. As it happens, there’s
nothing particularly special about the exquini. There’s just
more daytime than nighttime overall. Kind of inspiring! But
there’s one more slick trick that Earth has for keeping the
lights on. Before the light from the Sun can get to us (here on
the ground) it has to pass through the atmosphere. While the
atmosphere itself doesn’t do too much (aside from scattering
blue light and helping things breathe) the transition from the
airlessness of space to the airfullness of here does change the
direction that light travels. This is just refraction, which is
the same effect responsible for things not being where they
appear to be at the bottom of swimming pools, lenses working,
and blurry vision under water. Basically, when light has to pass
between a medium where it ca