Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“At the Winter Solstice, the wind is cold, trees are bare, and all lies in stillness beneath blankets of snow.” — Gary Zukav
The solstice (combining the Latin words sol for “Sun” and sistere for “To Stand Still”) is the point in whch the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest point in the sky for the year. Ancient astronomers came to know the day as one where the Sun appeared to stand still.
How I Made this photograph: I just happened to be in Acapulco, Mexico one year during the Winter Solstice. I was traveling with a group of writers and photographers and we were driving down the road when we noticed a group of indigenous people having a ceremony. We quietly approached them and asked, in Spanish, if it would be OK to photograph them and they said yes. We only had time to make a few photographs (I shot 35, most, maybe all of them, were not that great.) The camera used was a Canon EOS-1D Mark II with an EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 100mm.) Exposure was 1/250 sec at f/9 and ISO 320.
Today is the first day of winter and the Winter Solstice. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the Earth will be tilted as far away from the sun as it will be all year. It’s also the shortest day — and longest night — of the year and this year it occurs specifically at 3:44 AM MST here on Daisy Hill.
In the Northern Hemisphere, as summer advances to winter, the points on the horizon where the Sun rises and sets moves southward each day. The high point in the Sun’s daily path across the sky, which occurs at local Noon, also moves southward each day.
At the winter solstice, the Sun’s path has reached its southernmost position. The next day, the path will advance northward. However, a few days before and after the winter solstice, the change is so slight that the Sun’s path seems to stay the same or seemingly stand still. The Sun is directly overhead at “high-noon” on Winter Solstice at the latitude called the Tropic of Capricorn.
Here in Daisy Hill, not all that far from Parker CO, it can also be quite cold and snowy with temperatures below zero but the weather in Colorado is so unpredictable that I wouldn’t be surprised to see temperatures on in the 50’s.