When Is Earth's Darkest Day?

It's the middle of December and up here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are getting dark pretty early. Of course, in a couple weeks or so we'll hit the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It would make sense then that this would also be the darkest day of the year. But that's not quite the case. It's actually quite an interesting little tidbit: What day does the highest population of humanity experience darkness? Turns out, it was December 6 in 2022. At 2:56 p.m. that day, it was dark out for 86% of the global population. Funny enough, it was very much not dark outside here in Maryland at that point, but the vast majority of the global population doesn't live in the Americas, so what can you do?

And if you're curious, the brightest day of the year was July 8; at 7:56 a.m., 99% of humanity were experiencing daylight. In that case, presumably only Australia, some Pacific islands, and maybe a bit of the Americas' Pacific coastline were dark.