A few people have mentioned the study that showed a 25 hour day.

If you are setting up a control system, one way to do that is to set the hard reset at longer than expected and then have a soft reset trigger at the "best" time.

This means if the soft reset is missed for any reason, the second hard reset will kick in but not before the potential "optimum".

The sun rising in this case is the soft reset and if you miss that you get at most an extra hour so you are not too far out of rhythm.