Today is the shortest day of the year....On a positive note...Its all brighter from here until June!!!! :) :) :) Winter solstice is an astronomical phenomenon which marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Winter solstice occurs for the Northern Hemisphere in December and for the Southern Hemisphere in June. The axial tilt of Earth and gyroscopic effects of the planets daily rotation keep the axis of rotation pointed at the same point in the sky. As the Earth follows its orbit around the Sun, the same hemisphere that faced away from the Sun, experiencing winter, will, in half a year, face towards the Sun and experience summer. This is because the two hemispheres face opposite directions along the planetary pole, as one polar hemisphere experiences winter, the other experiences summer. More evident from high latitudes, a hemispheres winter solstice occurs on the shortest day and longest night of the year, when the suns daily maximum elevation in the sky is the lowest.[1] The winter solstice itself lasts only a moment in time, so other terms are used for the day on which it occurs, such as midwinter, or the shortest day. It is often considered the extreme of winter (Dongzhi in the Chinese calendar), although in meteorology winter spans the entire period of December through February. The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates differ from winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earths elliptical orbit.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 15:41:03 +0000
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