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.

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?

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.