We are just a few days from the summer solstice and the year's shortest night. On June 20, the sun will set at 9:25 p.m. and will rise the following morning at 5:32 a.m. Officially, the night will be just eight hours and seven minutes long. However, the night won't be very dark for a lot of that time.
Sunrise and sunset are calculated from the points at which the disk of the sun would be visible from a flat, oceanlike horizon and does not take into account any twilight. At our northern latitude, the sun's path across the sky is at a fairly oblique angle, so we have a relatively long period of twilight.
In fact, for a few weeks around the summer solstice, a clear sky over Fargo-Moorhead never goes absolutely dark, as there is always a small but measurable amount of sunlight even in the middle of the night.
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