How many days until autumn?

Autumn begins at the September equinox, on or around the 22nd, when daylight and darkness are roughly equal again and Britain starts losing light at a noticeable pace. By the end of October the evenings have collapsed inwards, and the clocks going back on the last Sunday of the month makes the change abrupt rather than gradual.

It is arguably the country's most photogenic season. Beech and oak woodland turns through the second half of October, conkers come down, hedgerows fill with blackberries and sloes, and the National Trust car parks fill with people who have come out specifically to look at leaves. Harvest festivals run in schools and churches through late September.

The calendar is dense too: the new school year settling in, university terms starting, party conference season, Halloween, Bonfire Night, and Remembrance Sunday in the second week of November. Storms get their names used for the first time as the Atlantic system season begins, and the first frosts arrive inland well before the coast.

Meteorological autumn starts on 1 September in Met Office publications, which is why forecasts and calendars often disagree by three weeks. The date tracked here is the equinox, and the countdown runs to the midnight at which that day begins.