Equinox Shadow Lines

As we move on away from the equinox I thought I would post this photo of the lines made by the shadow tip from a stick (or in this case a kids swingball!).

These two lines are from the shadows approaching noon and only one day apart. Since it is the equinox, they are near exact east/west lines. The gap between the chalk lines is at its greatest at the equinox and closes to near zero at the solstices.

On a slight tangent, it was a very similar method, ie. measuring the length of the shadows that helped the ancient Greeks come up with their first estimates of the size of the earth.

Go South

Twilight at either end of the day is a good time to look south this month. At dusk Jupiter is the first night object to appear, narrowly but clearly, above the southern horizon. This morning at sunrise Sirius was the last object to disappear, again it was due south. I took these two pictures at 6.30am, one looking east showing the red dawn. The other looking south. It is not a fascinating photo of Sirius but it does at least show that there is nothing else visible around it.

On a tangent, the expression 'go south' is often used to mean something is past its best. 'Tottenham seem to have gone south under Ramos' influence.' In the US it was more usually 'gone west', but even there south seems to be winning through. If you are something of a verbal sleuth there is a thorough tour of these expressions here.

Equinox - lovely word.

At 15.44 (GMT) this afternoon the sun crosses the celestial equator. It is the autumnal equinox. What on earth has that got to do with the price of toast, I hear you ask. Well amongst other things it means that today is one of only two days this year that the sun rises and sets due east and west.

Equinox, mmm, equinox, lovely word. Did you know that it comes from the Latin words for 'equal' and 'night', because on the equinoxes everywhere in the world experiences the same amount of day and night-time?

Two Beaches for the Price of One

There is something surreal, perhaps postmodern?, about blogging about a newspaper that is writing about you. Ian Belcher reviewed my course in the Sunday Times Travel section today, you can read it here, but then you might be reading this because you've already read his piece... such are the conundrums of modern life...

Back to reality. I am sometimes struck by how different it can feel walking in different directions along the same beach. Often this is because the wind goes from being on your back to being on your face, but there can be more solid reasons. At Climping where I was this morning the shingle is moved gradually and relentlessly eastwards by the waves. This forces it up against the groynes and means that if you walk east you are faced by gentle hills and sharp drops down, but when you turn around you walk down gentle down slopes and are faced with steep rises. In the legs it feels like a different beach altogether.

Smoke and Sun

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a 'typical English country scene'. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which is sort of what we have come to expect from the southern central English coast.

The sheep don't seem to have aligned themselves in any useful way, which considering the effort that the rest of the scene is going to is not very cooperative of them. They could learn a lot from their fellow grazers, the cows that have been posing for Google recently.