A Pedestal of the Sun for the Solstice

Analemma printed on a globe (Globe Museum, Vienna)

The second solstice for the year is today, December 21st. It literally happens at a moment in time but like many cosmic events, most of us think of it as a day. For those in Northern Hemisphere, it will be the winter solstice and for those in Southern Hemisphere, it will be the summer solstice marking the first day of the two seasons.

At that moment, it will be sunset in North and South America, sunrise in far-eastern Asia, midnight in Africa and Europe, and noontime over the Pacific Ocean.

In Paradelle (Northern Hemisphere), we will have our shortest day and longest night of the year. This month, one rotation of Earth relative to the noonday sun – what we call a day – is about 30 seconds longer than the average 24 hours. Get past that “day” that is on your calendar or the idea of that clock face.

You would actually be better off measuring the true length of a solar day (the time from one solar noon to the next) by using a sundial.

The photo at the top of this post shows an analemma printed on a globe that shows the sun’s declination. That is the angular distance from the celestial equator and the difference (in minutes) between time as measured by the clock and time as measured by the sun. Sounds complicated, right?

In fact, in astronomy, an analemma (from Greek “pedestal of a sundial”) is a curve representing the changing angular offset of a celestial body (usually the Sun) from its mean position on the celestial sphere as viewed from another celestial body (usually the Earth).  Still complicated.

Analemma plotted as seen at noon GMT from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (latitude 51.48° north, longitude 0.0015° west).

The Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun is an elliptical orbit. That means it is tilted relative to the plane of the equator. We, being observers at a fixed point on the Earth, see the Sun appear to move in an analemma around a mean position. If you observed the position of the Sun in the sky and plotted it or photographed it at the same time every few days, all year-long, the points would trace out the analemma.

I did this very unscientifically one year by just noting where the Sun appeared (I used a compass) when viewed every morning as I had my breakfast and gazed out the east window. It amazed me how far the Sun moved during the year. I ended up with a graph of the Sun’s declination plotted against the equation of time.

Like the “equator” or other terms, an analemma is an abstract concept. It has no physical existence except in diagrams and time-lapse photographs. Nevertheless, we do describe it as if it were a real, visible celestial object.

This afternoon analemma photo was taken in Murray Hill, NJ – not far from Paradelle – at Bell Laboratories where my father worked in the 1950s and early 196os.

Aligning With the Sun

I’m not a fan of winter. I don’t like the cold. Yes, I could move south where winter is warmer. I could go to the Southern Hemisphere where my winter is summer. But I do like solstices which turn autumn into winter and spring into summer.

Ancient monuments around the world (and something in my backyard) are aligning with the Sun and will line up on the 21st for the solstice. It starts winter. Or it begins the trip to spring.

Although the word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), the sun won’t stand still on December 21st. The solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun’s position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer’s hemisphere.

I like that people have been paying attention to this for a very long time. Stonehenge is perhaps the world’s most famous “henge monument” that marks the solstices. The first monument was built about 5,000 years ago, and the stone circle was erected in the late Neolithic period about 2500 BC. And some of us are still paying attention.

We all eventually realize that the nights will be getting shorter and the days will be getting longer after this solstice. It is the day when there is no sunlight at the North Pole. That must be quite strange.

Druids would be chanting as the solstice dawn approaches at Stonehenge. In Greek mythology, the gods and goddesses met on the winter and summer solstices.

We Are Tilted at 23.5 Degrees

A solstice at Stonehenge

Summer solstice 2021 in Northern Hemisphere arrives today. In the Eastern time zone, it arrives precisely at 11:31 PM. That seems odd to me. It thought it usually seems to occur early morning or during the day, so summer coming in darkness feels odd. But it still arrives.

Though the solstice is the first official day of summer, many of us in this hemisphere have been feeling like it has been summer for a few weeks. Flowers are blooming. I have been to the Atlantic Ocean and sat on a beach along the Jersey shore, as I have every summer of my life.

In the northern part of the world going back to much older times, the solstice was celebrated as midsummer. Some people believed that some plants had magical properties today. Fairies, ghosts, and spirits were thought to be especially active today. Mr. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays off many of those beliefs which were not considered true in his time. But those things were certainly known to his audience and there were certainly people then (and now) that weren’t so sure it was all just a “fairy tale.”

In ancient China, the summer solstice was observed by a ceremony to celebrate the Earth, femininity, and the “yin” forces.

The Druidic name for the Summer Solstice is Alban Hefin, which means ‘The Light of the Shore” or ‘Light of Summer.” In pre-Christian Ireland and England, the movements of the sun formed the calendar and were based around the high-, mid- and low- points of the sun. Equinoxes and solstices were measured and celebrated at monuments around the island. Stonehenge is the most famous place but there were others throughout the land.

Of course, this is the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere and that idea never ceases to amaze me even though I know it is all about the Earth being tilted on its axis. It is not a huge tilt – 23.5 degrees – but that is what makes the difference between winter and summer.

Now, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. For me in Paradelle and others in the north, this will be the longest day(light) of the year and tonight will be the shortest night.

Celestial things don’t always seem logical. As a child, I would have said that summer meant we were closer to the Sun. Wrong. We are about 3 million miles farther away than we are in winter.

These days Midsummer’s Eve is still celebrated sometime between June 21 and June 24, especially in Scandinavia, Latvia, and other locations in Northern Europe. I am told it is right behind Christmas on the holiday list.

If I was feeling my ancestors from Northern Europe more strongly today I might have made this weekend more of a holiday and danced around maypoles and burned straw witches in a bonfire. I did bring some fresh flowers into the house and I could light up the fire pit. It’s no Stonehenge but then again it is 2021.

Solstice Fires

Winter solstice 2020 in the Northern Hemisphere will be at 5:02 AM (10:02 UTC) on Monday, December 21.

What can I say about solstices or the winter solstice specifically that I haven’t said in years past?

You’ve probably seen photos of neo-Pagans celebrating at Stonehenge or elsewhere with the solstice sunrise. That’s a kind of fire, and other celebrations often involve a fire. A nice fire in winter certainly makes sense.

Of course, tomorrow will the summer solstice for those lucky people on the bottom half of the planet. No fires required, though you can still have one to look at while you sip a drink or to put under those shrimp when you slip them on the barbie.

Solstice is from the Latin solstitium, from sol (sun) and stitium (to stop) because those ancient observers believed that the Sun stopped and headed in another direction to start the winter solstitium.

It occurs in our calendar near the end of the year, but in ancient Egypt, this solstice marked the start of the new year. They observed the rising of the star Sirius which happen around this time. It coincided with the annual flooding of the Nile River which was important to agriculture.

According to Wikipedia, there are other celebrations on the winter solstice.

• Alban Arthan (Welsh)
• Blue Christmas (Western Christian)
• Brumalia (Ancient Rome)
• Dongzhi Festival (East Asia)
• Sanghamitta Day (Theravada Buddhism)
• Shalako (Zuni)
• Yaldā (Iran)
• Yule in the Northern Hemisphere (Neopagan)
• Ziemassvētki (ancient Latvia)
• Midwinter Day (Antarctica)

Korochun, Koliada, Koročun Kolyiadki, Kračun – there are several names for the Slavic pagan winter solstice holiday. The costumes are quite colorful.

Maybe I’ll write about those celebrations in the years to come. One celebration that I feel a bit of an ancestral connection to is the Slavic Korochun. Its origin doesn’t seem to be clear, but modern scholars tend to associate this holiday with ancestor worship. The winter solstice was a day to make fires at cemeteries to keep their loved ones warm. They would hold feasts to honor the dead and keep them fed. They also lit wooden logs at local crossroads. (Crossroads figure in folk magic and mythology – see this earlier post.)

I think setting a fire in a cemetery or burning logs at my local crossroads would be seriously frowned upon by the authorities.  Perhaps, just a Viking toast to the solstice tomorrow night?

This Longest Night of the Year

The winter solstice viewed at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, USA.By Tim Ereneta from Berkeley, CA – solstice gathering, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Winter solstice is an astronomical phenomenon that marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. This is the December solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the June solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. For 2019, the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere will be at 11:19 PM ET today, Saturday, December 21.

The winter solstice is also known as the hiemal solstice or hibernal solstice,  Midwinter, Yule, the Longest Night and Jólo.

We get a solstice when one of the Earth’s poles has its maximum tilt away from the Sun. That happens twice yearly. For me, this is the shortest period of daylight and longest night of the year, but if I was at the North Pole, there is continuous darkness or twilight around the winter solstice. (It’s the opposite for the summer solstice.)

Why would anyone think of the solstice as “Midwinter” when it seems to be the start of winter? If you want to be optimistic, after the winter solstice the days get longer and the nights shorter. But I have to admit that in Paradelle I think of mid-January as midwinter.

The December solstice is usually the 21st or 22nd of December. As with Full Moons, a solstice really lasts only a moment, but we popularly refer to the entire day as the Winter Solstice.

In prehistory, the solstices were observed carefully and were much more significant cultural events. There were festivals and rituals and superstitions and beliefs around this occurrence. It was seen by some as the symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun.

The late Neolithic and Bronze Age sites at Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland are still the site of ceremonies. The primary axes of both of these monuments seem to have been carefully aligned on a sight line pointing to the winter solstice sunrise (Newgrange) and the winter solstice sunset (Stonehenge).

The pagan Scandinavian and Germanic people of northern Europe celebrated a twelve-day “midwinter” holiday called Yule ( Jul, Julblot, jólablót, midvinterblot, julofferfest). This holiday gave us many of the modern Christmas traditions, such as the Christmas tree, the Christmas wreath, the Yule log.  Scandinavians still call Christmas “Jul” and in English “Yule” is often connected to the “yuletide” season which has been in usage since 900.

In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, the setting of the poem is the woods on the Winter Solstice.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

Like the driver in those woods, it is good to stop a moment today and consider the solstice and nature’s beauty around us – but then, though
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” we all have our
promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Signs of Summer

All the indicators of summer are here in Paradelle: Father’s Day, the smell of barbeques in the air, roses in blooms, green tomatoes in my garden, the first tiger lily blooms were this week, school ending (at least for southern schools and northern private and parochial schools), proud parent prom pictures on Facebook, people headed “down the shore” (as we say in New Jersey) starting with Memorial Day – and then, officially, the summer solstice. (The official part for my neighborhood is June 21, 2019 at 11:54 am EDT.)

Solstices are opposite on either side of the equator. Our summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.

I have already written for past solstices of the solstitium (Latin for sol/sun and stitium/stop) and its ancient belief that the Sun appeared to stop at this time.  In our northern hemisphere, the Sun is actually higher in the sky throughout the day, so its rays are hitting Earth at a more direct angle and it is heating us up.

There is usually a Full Moon near the solstice, though there is no astronomical connection.

Although the summer solstice is the longest day of the year, that is relative. It may well seem the same or shorter than other days. In Paradelle, we just had three days of rain and rainy days always seem shorter to me. Today is summerish – reaching up in the 80 degrees and drying out things so that I can cut the grass.

Sunrise today was at 5:24 am at 58° Northeast. I was happy to have slept through it.  Sunset today will be at 8:30 pm at 302° Northwest.

Unlike the ancient ones, we now know that the Sun does not stop today, bit it does cross a path and “shifts” position at a moment in time. I observe the position of the Sun during the year relative to my home and at one time tracked it on my office wall. Isaac Newton did this too. I’m no Newton but I did like being a citizen scientist for my own curiosity and noting that when I was sipping my morning coffee on the couch, the Sun shines right on me. On the winter solstice – when I could use the extra heat – it is coming through a window on the other side of the room.

Whatever your signs of summer are, they probably have arrived too or are soon to appear. Hope you have a good season.