Terminus

[rejectomorph]

The exact moment when the sun is farthest south comes at 4:42 AM PST Tuesday morning. (If it goes farther, we're in trouble.) So, had the calendar not gotten screwed up, this would be New Year's Eve. Instead, it's just the tattered tail-end of autumn. But what the hell. I think I'll have a drink anyway. Then I have to put out the trash cans, because it's Monday. Happy Monday, everybody!

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[rejectomorph]

I wouldn't recommend standing on the Sun to see this sight. You would be even hotter there than you would be in Dingo, Queesnsland, which is a couple of miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn. If you were in that spot just north of Dingo at local noon on the December Solstice, the sun would appear directly overhead. A trip to Dingo would be far less expensive than a trip to the Sun, too.

If the axis of the earth, which runs from pole to pole, were to align perfectly with the Sun, you would have to stand at the South Pole on the December Solstice to lose your shadow, (and you wouldn't have to wait for noon- it would stay that way all day long), and the entire Northern Hemisphere would remain in darkness the entire day. I would not be the least bit happy about that, if by some miracle I had survived the cataclysmic event which had toppled the planet onto its side.

Fortunately for us all, the Tropics are the places on earth most distant from the Equator at which the sun's descending rays are ever perfectly vertical. True, this date could be considered high noon for the South Pole, which is exactly in the middle of its six month day, and Midnight for the North Pole, which is exactly in the middle of its six month night, but neither Pole ever faces the Sun directly. Only places between the Tropics ever do that.

Happy Winter Summer Solstice!

[carbonunit.livejournal.com]

Another exact way to define the event is, it's the moment when the plant of the earths orbit around the sun, and the axis of the earth, as seen from the locus of the orbit, appear to be at 90 degrees.

We suffer more because by chance this corresponds with the earths closest approach to the sun, the perihelion. Winter is slightly colder too. The larger amount of ocean in this hemisphere tends to mollify this effect.