[an encore, from a long ago Solstice. but still true today]
If you had walked out into my backyard around 4:40 the last few afternoons you would have been greeted with the orange ball of the sun setting with a final low glare over the tops of the buildings that I can see low on the horizon out across the Los Angeles basin. At this time each late afternoon I like to get out the binoculars that I keep next to the back door, and I step outside to watch the last seconds of the sun setting and to find the spot where the last glimmer of light for the day appears. Every night that glimmer has moved a little further to the south. Just a few weeks ago the last glint vanished just behind the cupola of the Pasadena city hall. By just the next day, the cupola was clear, but the sun disappeared behind the building to the left of city hall. Last night it set 4 or 5 office buildings further to the left, still, behind an anonymous office tower that I can't recognize, but through the binoculars appears impressive with the sun directly framing it and the occasional stray bit of light going through a window on the far side, rattling around on the inside, and emerging as the last bit of bit of light before a long winter night. Tonight I watched again, and the sun set behind exactly the same anonymous tower. It hadn't moved at all. Today, therefore, must be the solstice. The solstice is many things: the first day of winter, the earliest sunset, the longest night of the year, the latest sunrise. Most people notice the sunset more than anything else. But solstice comes from the latin "solstitium": sol for sun, and stitium for a stoppage ("armistice" comes from the same root: a stoppage of arms). The stoppage of the southern progression of the sun -- the turnaround to come back to the north -- was considered a big enough phenomenon to give the event its name. The sun stoppage. As the darkness tries to ascend (quickly; these winter twilights don't last) the other part of the season becomes clear. While the nearby glare of Los Angeles means that we never truly have darkness in these parts, this time of year everyone is doing their best to cut the darkness even more. I can see Christmas lights on the houses throughout Pasadena, and, with the binoculars, I can see to downtown Los Angeles where the buildings have been strung with lights. And who can blame them? With the nights so long and the sun moving further and further south, who would not want to try to do their part to make up for the absence of the light and the heat? Who would not be at least a little afraid at this time every year that the sun would somehow not decide to stop and then come back?
At our house we celebrate the solstice with our best attempt to coax back the sun. When the night is as dark as it will get, we gather with friends around our Christmas tree, turn out all of the lights in the house, and slowly refill the house with the yellowy-orange glow as we one by one light the dozens of candles hanging in the branches of the tree. Lighting candles on Christmas trees is a well known Bad Thing to Do, but we find that with a tree cut down the day before (and a fire extinguisher on hand just in case), all goes smoothly. Like the sun, the candles slowly go out. Some catch a few warm drafts and burn more quickly, some get less air and burn more slowly, but one by one they all eventually go until, with just two or three left, the house is dark again and the shadows of branches shimmer sinisterly on the ceiling. Finally the last candle sputters and dies, sometimes with a long glow and sometimes with a sudden final pop, and the longest night of the year totally envelopes us.
The night sky gets in on the act this time of year, too. Many people who claim to know no constellations in the sky can look up and identify Orion in the winter sky. With the three bright stars making the belt, the scabbard of stars hanging below, and the quartet making the shoulders and knees, Orion is truly simple to identify. But Orion is also composed of some of the brighter of the stars in the sky. In fact, look outside, and look around Orion. Bright stars are all around. The constellation of Taurus, Sirius, the brightest star around. The seasons of the sky are not created equally. Winter is a spectacular display of stars and constellations unlike any other, as if the stars, too, are trying to help us out on the longest winter nights by saving the best show for the very end of the year. None of this is true, of course. The spectacular winter skies are caused by the fact that we are looking straight in to the Milky Way galaxy, instead of out of it as we do in the spring and fall. But still, it is hard not to see the similarity between the lights strung in the town below trying to dispel the night and call back the sun, and the lights above, also seemingly strung for the same reason.
Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'm going to go outside with my binoculars and see exactly where the sun sets again. Because I do this every year, and because I can look up the precise date and time of the solstice, and because I know that the earth will continue to go around the sun with the same tilt for my entire lifetime, I know what will happen: the sun will have moved away from the anonymous office building and finally started moving right again. The day will get imperceptibly longer. Really, there is not much suspense in what will happen, just a certain reassuring inevitability. But if I didn't know these things and didn't have confidence in the inevitable, I can imagine myself holding my breath as the last rays of the sun were shooting out and I was trying to see just where it was setting. I stopped yesterday, but is it really turning around today? Will the days really get longer again? Will my crops (well, ok, my vegetable garden) come back to life? And I'll then see the spot and it will be clearly north and I'll know. And at that point, I will say to anyone within sight: happy new year. For while the calendar claims I have another week to go, the Christmas lights and the candles and Orion and Taurus and Sirius will have done their jobs, and the sun will have started its new year already today and we should all be glad for the solstice.
Showing posts with label seasons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seasons. Show all posts
Tiny Bunnies
This morning my 2 ½ year old daughter Lilah opened the front door to find the tiniest Easter basket I have ever seen, filled with candy, bubbles, and stickers. My suspicion, as yet unconfirmed, is that Easter baskets everywhere were equally tiny today, and that it is all the fault of the moon.
This is the third Easter Diane, Lilah, and I have spent in our house up in the foothills above Pasadena. After last year’s record low rainfall, Easter – and springtime in general – was marked by an intensifying of the brown in the canyon in our backyard. That same brown all over southern California contributed greatly to the intense wildfires that swept the region last fall. The small-scale wildlife that was abundant in our backyard two years ago – rabbits, squirrels, even the occasional bobcat and [once] black bear – generally disappeared.
This year the occasional torrential rains typical of southern California winters returned and gave everything a nice soaking. The canyon in our backyard is awash in green and is about to explode into a sea of yellow mustard flowers. Even the great canyon oaks which dominate the canyon and are designed for long term droughts have a fresh sheen from the first set of new leaves in two years. Squirrels have been running around chasing the droppings of the bird food we keep out for the finches and sparrows and blue jays and titmice. Some as-yet-unknown small animal sneaks through the fence around my garden and has been nibbling on the leaves of the artichokes. The first sweet pea pods are forming. Lilah has a small box with caterpillars waiting to change into butterflies and a small bucket with tadpoles waiting to change into frogs. With the equinox passing just two days ago, it certainly feels like spring has come.
But the bunnies? Two year ago, our first Easter, the connection between Easter and bunnies was obvious. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a curtain or door in the morning without stumbling on a new set of bunnies nibbling on the bushes, hopping down the street, playing in the grass. It was easy to explain to Lilah that the Easter bunny was certainly on his way. This year, though, the bunnies are almost unseen. One or two tiny babies have been spotted, but not the abundance of two Easters ago. What is going on?
I think the fault is not with the bunnies, but with Easter. Easter is awfully early this year, and it is likely that no one told the bunnies to start earlier. Two years ago Easter was on April 16th, a full three weeks later.
The bunnies should, of course, be watching the sun and the moon to know when Easter is. This year, in particular, with Easter so early, the method of choosing the date of Easter has been much in the news. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. The Spring Equinox is, of course, the precise midpoint between the long night of the Winter Solstice, back in December, and the eternal twilight of Summer Solstice, in June. On the Equinox, the day and night are of equal duration (the origin of the name) all around the planet. Also, the sun rises and sets directly east and west. Thus, one way to know that the equinox is near is if, like me, you live in a town where most streets are on a north-south-east-west grid, you will start to notice that the sun is always setting (or rising) precisely in your eyes as you head westward to go home at night (or eastward to leave home in the morning). That means the equinox.
Even the equinox occurred a little early this year. The precise moment when the sun was precisely over the equator (another way to define the equinox) was 5:48AM GMT on March 20th, which translates to 10:48PM PDT on March 19th here in Pasadena. Last year it was 5:07PM PDT on March 20th. In reality the equinox didn’t change, just our calendar. With leap year this year our calendar is behind by almost a day. It will catch up again over the next 4 years.
The full moon, which could come at any time over the next four weeks, happened to follow closely this year, occurring at 10:40am on March 21st. And it was a Friday, so the next Sunday was only 2 days later. Today is March 23rd, and it is Easter. The bunnies could have gotten it right by watching to see when night and day were equal lengths, looking for the next full moon, and watching driveways everywhere for an extra fat morning newspaper to know it was Sunday and thus Easter.
Except that this is not really correct. I used to imagine teams of astronomers sitting around with precise measuring tools to declare when the equinox had occurred to set everything in motion. I used to smugly explain all about astronomy’s role in determining the date of Easter to anyone who would listen. I used to wonder if it ever happened that the full moon followed the solstice by minutes and made for instant Easter. But, this year, I finally looked up who really decides. The answer is a bit disappointing, at least to me. For the purposes of Easter-determining, the equinox is on March 21st. No astronomer needs to track the sky; we can all just look at the calendar. The precise moment of the full moon? Not actually important either. Officially, centuries old calculations are used, which differ from the actual date of the full moon by up to two days.
Still, I could at least be smug in my amusement that yet again a major Christian holiday had clear ties to early astronomy and astrology and was designed to co-opt some sort of Pagan equinox celebration. Except, when I read more, I realized even that was not true. The timing was an actual attempt to figure out an actual date of the Last Supper, for which there is some indication that it was slightly before Passover. Passover, in the Hebrew calendar, occurs on the 15th day of Nisan. The first day of a moon was originally declared to occur when credible witnesses had seen a crescent moon. Nisan, which approximately translates in Babylonian as “until the barley is ripe,” was declared based on the critical springtime crop. It occurred around the time of the equinox. Fifteen days after the start of Nisan the moon would be full. And Passover would begin, on the day of the first full moon after the equinox.
So my smug amusement is totally misguided. Instead I should have understood and respected the observational, agricultural, and astronomical aspects of the much older Hebrew calendar. It is quite amazing that such a calendar designed thousands of years ago still underpins the basis of the day of one of the larger religious holidays of the year. But even with my newfound respect I can see the problems. The bunnies, even if they knew the astronomical rules, could never read all of the ancient tables. They will never know ahead of time when Easter is here. And occasionally, when the moon is right (and the tables are right too), Easter will show up weeks too early and then bunnies will not have grown. Easter baskets everywhere will have to be downsized so the tiny bunnies can carry them to front doors.
Luckily for me, at 2 ½ Lilah doesn’t yet know what she is missing. But next year, as a 3 ½ year old, she may catch on. Happily, next year, Easter is not until April 12th, and, once again, the bunnies will be running all around the yard, hiding candy and eggs as they go.
Labels: family, Lilah, seasons, sky watching 
Happy New Year
If you had walked out into my backyard around 4:40 the last few afternoons you would have been greeted with the orange ball of the sun setting with a final low glare over the tops of the buildings that I can see low on the horizon out across the Los Angeles basin. At this time each late afternoon I like to get out the binoculars that I keep next to the back door, and I step outside to watch the last seconds of the sun setting and to find the spot where the last glimmer of light for the day appears. Every night that glimmer has moved a little further to the south. Just a few weeks ago the last glint vanished just behind the cupola of the Pasadena city hall. By just the next day, the cupola was clear, but the sun disappeared behind the building to the left of city hall. Last night it set 4 or 5 office buildings further to the left, still, behind an anonymous office tower that I can't recognize, but through the binoculars appears impressive with the sun directly framing it and the occasional stray bit of light going through a window on the far side, rattling around on the inside, and emerging as the last bit of bit of light before a long winter night.
Tonight I watched again, and the sun set behind exactly the same anonymous tower. It hadn't moved at all. Today, therefore, must be the solstice. The solstice is many things: the first day of winter, the earliest sunset, the longest night of the year, the latest sunrise. Most people notice the sunset more than anything else. But solstice comes from the latin "solstitium": sol for sun, and stitium for a stoppage ("armistice" comes from the same root: a stoppage of arms). The stoppage of the southern progression of the sun -- the turnaround to come back to the north -- was considered a big enough phenomenon to give the event its name. The sun stoppage. As the darkness tries to ascend (quickly; these winter twilights don't last) the other part of the season becomes clear. While the nearby glare of Los Angeles means that we never truly have darkness in these parts, this time of year everyone is doing their best to cut the darkness even more. I can see Christmas lights on the houses throughout Pasadena, and, with the binoculars, I can see to downtown Los Angeles where the buildings have been strung with lights. And who can blame them? With the nights so long and the sun moving further and further south, who would not want to try to do their part to make up for the absence of the light and the heat? Who would not be at least a little afraid at this time every year that the sun would somehow not decide to stop and then come back?
At our house we celebrate the solstice with our best attempt to coax back the sun. When the night is as dark as it will get, we gather with friends around our Christmas tree, turn out all of the lights in the house, and slowly refill the house with the yellowy-orange glow as we one by one light the dozens of candles hanging in the branches of the tree. Lighting candles on Christmas trees is a well known Bad Thing to Do, but we find that with a tree cut down the day before (and a fire extinguisher on hand just in case), all goes smoothly. Like the sun, the candles slowly go out. Some catch a few warm drafts and burn more quickly, some get less air and burn more slowly, but one by one they all eventually go until, with just two or three left, the house is dark again and the shadows of branches shimmer sinisterly on the ceiling. Finally the last candle sputters and dies, sometimes with a long glow and sometimes with a sudden final pop, and the longest night of the year totally envelopes us.
The night sky gets in on the act this time of year, too. Many people who claim to know no constellations in the sky can look up and identify Orion in the winter sky. With the three bright stars making the belt, the scabbard of stars hanging below, and the quartet making the shoulders and knees, Orion is truly simple to identify. But Orion is also composed of some of the brighter of the stars in the sky. In fact, look outside, and look around Orion. Bright stars are all around. The constellation of Taurus, Sirius, the brightest star around. The seasons of the sky are not created equally. Winter is a spectacular display of stars and constellations unlike any other, as if the stars, too, are trying to help us out on the longest winter nights by saving the best show for the very end of the year. None of this is true, of course. The spectacular winter skies are caused by the fact that we are looking straight in to the Milky Way galaxy, instead of out of it as we do in the spring and fall. But still, it is hard not to see the similarity between the lights strung in the town below trying to dispel the night and call back the sun, and the lights above, also seemingly strung for the same reason.
Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'm going to go outside with my binoculars and see exactly where the sun sets again. Because I do this every year, and because I can look up the precise date and time of the solstice, and because I know that the earth will continue to go around the sun with the same tilt for my entire lifetime, I know what will happen: the sun will have moved away from the anonymous office building and finally started moving right again. The day will get imperceptibly longer. Really, there is not much suspense in what will happen, just a certain reassuring inevitability. But if I didn't know these things and didn't have confidence in the inevitable, I can imagine myself holding my breath as the last rays of the sun were shooting out and I was trying to see just where it was setting. I stopped yesterday, but is it really turning around today? Will the days really get longer again? Will my crops (well, ok, my vegetable garden) come back to life? And I'll then see the spot and it will be clearly north and I'll know. And at that point, I will say to anyone within sight: happy new year. For while the calendar claims I have another week to go, the Christmas lights and the candles and Orion and Taurus and Sirius will have done their jobs, and the sun will have started its new year already today and we should all be glad for the solstice.
At our house we celebrate the solstice with our best attempt to coax back the sun. When the night is as dark as it will get, we gather with friends around our Christmas tree, turn out all of the lights in the house, and slowly refill the house with the yellowy-orange glow as we one by one light the dozens of candles hanging in the branches of the tree. Lighting candles on Christmas trees is a well known Bad Thing to Do, but we find that with a tree cut down the day before (and a fire extinguisher on hand just in case), all goes smoothly. Like the sun, the candles slowly go out. Some catch a few warm drafts and burn more quickly, some get less air and burn more slowly, but one by one they all eventually go until, with just two or three left, the house is dark again and the shadows of branches shimmer sinisterly on the ceiling. Finally the last candle sputters and dies, sometimes with a long glow and sometimes with a sudden final pop, and the longest night of the year totally envelopes us.
The night sky gets in on the act this time of year, too. Many people who claim to know no constellations in the sky can look up and identify Orion in the winter sky. With the three bright stars making the belt, the scabbard of stars hanging below, and the quartet making the shoulders and knees, Orion is truly simple to identify. But Orion is also composed of some of the brighter of the stars in the sky. In fact, look outside, and look around Orion. Bright stars are all around. The constellation of Taurus, Sirius, the brightest star around. The seasons of the sky are not created equally. Winter is a spectacular display of stars and constellations unlike any other, as if the stars, too, are trying to help us out on the longest winter nights by saving the best show for the very end of the year. None of this is true, of course. The spectacular winter skies are caused by the fact that we are looking straight in to the Milky Way galaxy, instead of out of it as we do in the spring and fall. But still, it is hard not to see the similarity between the lights strung in the town below trying to dispel the night and call back the sun, and the lights above, also seemingly strung for the same reason.
Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'm going to go outside with my binoculars and see exactly where the sun sets again. Because I do this every year, and because I can look up the precise date and time of the solstice, and because I know that the earth will continue to go around the sun with the same tilt for my entire lifetime, I know what will happen: the sun will have moved away from the anonymous office building and finally started moving right again. The day will get imperceptibly longer. Really, there is not much suspense in what will happen, just a certain reassuring inevitability. But if I didn't know these things and didn't have confidence in the inevitable, I can imagine myself holding my breath as the last rays of the sun were shooting out and I was trying to see just where it was setting. I stopped yesterday, but is it really turning around today? Will the days really get longer again? Will my crops (well, ok, my vegetable garden) come back to life? And I'll then see the spot and it will be clearly north and I'll know. And at that point, I will say to anyone within sight: happy new year. For while the calendar claims I have another week to go, the Christmas lights and the candles and Orion and Taurus and Sirius will have done their jobs, and the sun will have started its new year already today and we should all be glad for the solstice.
Labels: seasons, sky watching
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