Video | The sun rises first in Maine - by a longshot

One of the greatest aspects of living in or visiting Maine is that we get sunshine before anyone else in the United States.

Curious about how much earlier Princeton, Maine, sees the sun before Melbourne, Fla., I checked out the U.S. Naval Observatory's sunrise-sunset tabulations.

Yesterday, Aug. 25, the sun peeked over the ocean's surface at 6:58 a.m. in Brevard, according to the Navy's Web site.

But in Washington County, Maine, the Sunrise County, the sun rose at 5:44 a.m. If you're bad at math, that's one whole hour and 14 minutes earlier than in Florida.

I knew that Maine had longer days during the summer because it's farther north. Alaska, after all, has the longest sunlight period of all the states.

Sunset in Florida was at 7:51 p.m. yesterday, and it was 7:20 p.m. in Maine. That means I had 43 more minutes to soak in the sun, though the temperature was in the high 60s here, as opposed to high 80s in Florida.

I woke up about 20 minutes before the sun rose over the peninsula that parallels Slipps Point, the north-south peninsula on which my parents live. This video is taken in my parents' backyard; the sunset video was in the front. It's 61 minutes of footage condensed to about 40 seconds. I used music because there was absolutely no sound; it was completely still yesterday morning.

This is what I had to grow up with: Quite a wicked view we have here, isn't it?