The Lovely Curves of Twilight in Orlando and Animal Kingdom Operating Hours

By Dave Shute

Some rather curious articles lately, especially one in Motley Fool, have suggested that Disney is backing away from its new evening program at the Animal Kingdom and “taking the night off.”

I think this comes from

1. Lack of familiarity with the Animal Kingdom’s common past operating hours, which typically showed 7p or 8p closes the busiest times of the year, and 5p and 6p closes the rest of the year (that is, no one who knows Disney operations well would have expected 11p closes at Animal Kingdom in later September), and
2. Lack of familiarity with how Disney for a while now has been under-gunning operating hours in its calendar releases until the final update it does a couple of weeks before the affected month starts.

I have great sympathy for this, as Disney World is about the hardest trivial topic there is to master, with the possible exception of fantasy football.

COMPARED TO PAST PRACTICES, ANIMAL KINGDOM IS OPEN ONLY ABOUT 45 MINUTES LESS IN SEPTEMBER THAN IT WAS IN THE SUMMER

This summer through Labor Day, the Animal Kingdom is open until 11p. This is three to five hours later than the old typical close.

This September after Labor Day the Animal Kingdom is open until 9p every night through September 29, and until 8.30p on September 30. In 2015, in contrast, Animal Kingdom closed at 5p almost every night. This 2016 schedule is, on average, about four hours later than the old typical close.

The average difference between the extended hours of the summer of 2016 through Labor Day and September 2016 after Labor Day is 45 minutes. Hardly “taking the night off.”

To get to this, let’s look at some data, starting first with sunset and twilight to set the context.

THE CURVES OF SUNSET IN ORLANDO

The chart below shows the times of sunset (the lowest line), full dark (the highest line) and the three intervening periods of twilight for Orlando in the summer.

I’ve explained the twilight times elsewhere, but think that explanation was too technical.

So let’s try again–imagine me piloting a small sailboat on the Potomac, as I did in my teens, dealing with three types of the fading of the day:

• During civil twilight, the details of objects are still visible, so I could clearly see what I was about to run into. You would not do an evening show during civil twilight.
• During nautical twilight, it’s dark enough that most stars are visible, but light enough that you can still see a clear horizon dividing the earth from the darkening sky. Sailors would use this period of nautical twilight to measure the angle of specific stars from the horizon as an aid to navigation, hence the name. You can’t see details, but masses of objects may still be visible, especially early in the period, and later if they are occluding the horizon, so I’d likely see what I was about to run into, at least at the last moment. This is a fine time for an evening show.
• Astronomical twilight is the period between when the horizon disappears and full dark. You can’t really see anything, so I’d know I ran into something only from the thumping and sea-muffled screams, perhaps my own. This period is so close to full dark that I wonder if it was just made up by Astronomics so that they could get their names in the paper.

The next chart layers on 2016 Animal Kingdom closes (the top green line) and 2015 closes (the bottom purplish line, with the dotted purplish line showing the average 2015 close up to Labor Day, and then after Labor Day).

It also adds as red dotted lines the 2016 9p and 10.30p times of the Jungle Book show, which is not scheduled after Labor Day—at least so far; most people think it will be over then and dark until Rivers of Light opens.

Three things are especially worth noting:

• Disney routinely kicked off the Jungle Book show in later June and earlier July at the beginning of nautical twilight
• After Labor Day, the park is not open deeply into full dark the way it was in the summer
• However, if you compare the green line to the purplish line, you can see that post Labor Day hours are still quite extended compared to 2015.

The next chart makes this last point more explicit by showing the difference between 2015 and 2016 operating hours and hours open after the end of civil sunset.

The top blue line is extra hours in 2016 by day compared to the same date in 2015, and the black dotted line within it shows the average extra hours up until and then after Labor Day.

In the 2016 summer up until Labor Day, the Animal Kingdom is open on average just a little more than 4.5 hours extra compared to 2015, and after Labor Day it is open on average just a little less than four extra hours.

The difference of the two averages is 45 minutes. So your headline could be “Animal Kingdom Open Almost Four Hours More in September 2016 than 2015” or it could be “Animal Kingdom Open 45 Minutes Less in Later September than in Earlier Summer 2016,” but “Animal Kingdom Taking the Night Off” is a goofy response to the data.

The bottom orange line shows a more significant difference.

It depicts the hours after civil twilight ends that the park is open, with averages up until and then after Labor Day shown in the red dots.

Up until Labor Day the schedule has at least 2 hours of park open after civil twilight, while after Labor Day there’s only at least one hour of civil twilight—with a 75 minute difference between the averages.

So there is less time in later September to experience Animal Kingdom in the dark. There’s enough, if no Jungle Book, but much less than in the earlier months.

Right now for most of October Animal Kingdom is showing 7p closes. (A few are later). As the table below notes, civil twilight ends at ~7.30p at the beginning of the October, and 7p late in the month.

Given this and the pattern of September, I expect Animal Kingdom October closes to be extended to 8.30p early in the month and 8p later if Rivers of Light is not open then, and to have either yet another hour of opening added after the end of civil twilight if Rivers of Light is open, or the scheduling of a second Rivers of Light half an hour after park close, as commonly happens with the second Fantasmic show at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Updated hours? What’s that? Well, that’s the second topic on which the articles about the Animal Kingdom “taking the night off” are a bit goofy.

DISNEY ROUTINELY UNDERSTATES EVENTUAL OPERATING HOURS

The same articles displayed a certain level of conviction that the closes Disney is currently showing for October and after will be maintained. But for quite a while now Disney’s operating calendars have shown shorter hours than what it often actually eventually opens for.

For example, Disney is showing 9p Magic Kingdom closes for the incredibly busy later March spring break weeks.  Not gonna happen—final closes will be much later than that.

The Animal Kingdom in fact may close at the times after September currently indicated on the calendars. But no experienced Disney World watcher would bet on that.

The calendars for a month don’t get real until about two weeks before the month starts. After that update is the only time you can treat them as data. Until them, they are interesting tales about minimum hours, but not indicative of actual hours.

(Sunset and twilight data from this handy link—click at the bottom for different months)

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