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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Solstice in twelve hours
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2015 Dec 21, 16:35 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2015 Dec 21, 16:35 -0500
I believe the delay of seasons with respect to insolation in the temperate zones has to do with cooling down and warming up the earth, especially water. It takes until the summer solstice to warm up the earth, and cool down doesn’t start until near the fall equinox and winter until the winter equinox. Without the ballast, June 21st should be the height of summer rather than the beginning, likewise for December 21 and winter.
Fred Hebard
On Dec 21, 2015, at 4:15 PM, David Pike <NoReply_DavidPike@fer3.com> wrote:Yippee! Soon be spring again. It’s funny how we seem to move into winter faster than we come out of it. I think this must be because the clocks don’t go back in the UK until the Sat/Sun nearest 31st October, less than two months before the solstice, whereas they don’t go on again until the Sat/Sun nearest 31st March, over three months after the solstice. Could this originally have been to allow extra daylight time to get the potato crop in?? When I was at school in the 1950s, the autumn half-term was still called ‘tatey bashin week’. Thanks to easy World-wide transport, my local supermarket has potatoes of all varieties, including ‘new potatoes’, on sale all the year round. I suppose that these days, with autonomous tractors and DGPS, you could gather them in the dark. DaveP