Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend, ushering in dark afternoons as we head towards cold winter nights.

Daylight saving time ends on Sunday, Nov. 5, 2023 at 2 a.m., which, for most people, means moving clocks back one hour before bed on Saturday night, Nov. 4 – assuming your smart devices don’t handle the task for you. The change moves us on to what’s known as “Standard Time.”

The change – or “falling back” – means it can feel like you get an extra hour of sleep on Sunday, though in reality it just shifts more daylight into winter’s morning hours.  The amount of daylight will decrease each day until Dec. 21 when the winter solstice arrives and the amount of daylight begins to increase again.

Standard Time will continue until March 10, 2024 when DST starts again. The cycle repeats and time changes again on Nov. 3, 2024.

Under federal law, DST begins on the second Sunday in March and runs through the first Sunday in November. It’s not observed everywhere, however. Parts of Arizona, Hawaii and some U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands do not observe DST.

Recent efforts to do away with the time change have proved unsuccessful.

In 2021, Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill that would put Alabama on DST year-round, becoming one of 19 states enacting legislation to do away with the time change. The problem is doing that will require Congressional action and, so far, that’s failed to receive bipartisan traction.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, along with other lawmakers, including Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act of 2023 earlier this year. The act, which in 2021 passed the Senate but languished in the House, would eliminate the changing of the clocks to standard time and move the U.S. on DST all year. The 2023 version has only made it as far as the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.