Why do we get the least amount of sunshine on this day?; The cultures that chose this day as Rosh Hashanah and why it sometimes falls on December 21-22Bar and rarely on the 20th or 23rd in it
The winter solstice, the first day of winter or the shortest day of the year, falls according to slight shifts in the Gregorian calendar around December 21 in the Northern Hemisphere. while in the southern hemisphere at the same time the longest day of summer occurs.
Conversely, six months ago, the northern hemisphere experienced the longest day - the summer solstice while the southern hemisphere experienced its winter solstice. It is part of a cycle that never ends and which is at the heart of the system of seasons.
The length of the day does not change, what we do lose or gain (in winter or summer respectively) is hours of sunlight. In winter we get the least amount of sunlight of the year on this day.
In order to understand the winter and summer solstices, we need to understand a basic fact - the earth's axis of rotation is tilted approximately 23.5 degrees compared to the plane of its orbit around the sun. This means that the Earth's orbit oscillates as it orbits the Sun throughout the year. In this situation, the different hemispheres are exposed to a varying amount of sunlight, when this tendency causes the sunlight to hit the Earth's surface at different angles at different times of the year.
In summer we see the sun for longer periods and it appears high in the sky. The sun's rays are more direct and the heat energy is more widespread. In winter, when the sun is low in the sky and visible for a smaller number of hours, less energy reaches the ground and therefore the sun heats less efficiently.
Those who live near the equator will notice almost no difference in the amount of sunlight they receive throughout the year. The biggest difference is at the poles, where each reversal brings the number of daylight hours to extremes. In the summer the sun never sets for weeks, and in the winter it never rises creating some of the most uncomfortable environments on Earth.
Very rarely does the first day of winter fall on December 20th or 23rd, and usually it falls on December 21st or 22nd. The last time the winter solstice occurred on December 23rd was in 1903 and the next time will not occur until 2303. A solstice day on December 20th also occurs rarely with the next time being in 2080. The shifts between December 21st and 22nd are also mainly due From the leap cycle in the Gregorian calendar where a day is added every four years and the year is 366 days long. This is because the length of the tropical year - the year measured by the change of seasons is 365.242199 (the figure is not fixed and changes from year to year due to the influence of other planets on the Earth's orbit). The exact path of the Earth's daily rotation around its axis also causes a kind of oscillation in the Earth's axis (precession), and this movement also contributes to changes in the dates of the solstice days.
Throughout history, many methods were proposed for calculating the year, some of which were based on astronomy - mainly the equinoxes in September or March, or the solstice days in June (apparently the summer solstice was a holiday at Stonehenge) and December. The solstice days are easier to observe when you can see when the sun is at its southernmost possible point (northern hemisphere winter) or northernmost point (northern hemisphere summer).
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- Amir Burnett - Towards the shortest day of the year, December 2008 - on the Hidan website
- Time in a side view – Perhaps one of the best articles ever written about time travel
- For information on the Universe Today website
11 תגובות
A very educated and thought-provoking article.
I heard a lot about equinoxes, the longest/shortest day of the year, etc., despite that I didn't really attach importance to it.
It makes me want to explore all the mysteries of our Earth and the entire Milky Way galaxy we live in, and even more.
Really kudos to the author who gives such good articles, excellently explained.
A beautiful and in-depth review, an abbreviated review intended for children of the subject is available here:
http://eureka.org.il/item/43191
The sentence "the length of the day does not change" is not true.
very interesting. So the nights are longer and the days are shorter. In the last almost two years I have been awake mostly and especially at night. So it's like I have longer nights to be awake. Very interesting 🙂
Sit, if you divide the seasons in Israel into two, as in the Bible, the "hot days" and the "rainy days", I can agree with you that the equinox is the beginning of winter and its counterpart is the beginning of summer. If you divide them into four, then the beginning of winter is somewhere in the middle of November (it's a bit like the Christmas of the whites. You don't really see it), and its peak is indeed today.
Thus, the beginning of spring is also in the middle of February, the beginning of summer is in the middle of May and the beginning of autumn is in the middle of August. It is no coincidence that the stones herald the coming of autumn precisely in the middle of the fifties at the end of the holiday...
By the way, the days get longer and shorter precisely from the long day and the short day, not from the equinoxes.
"Earth's climate has a delayed ignition" - winter is not related to climate at all, but only to the length of a day, and certainly not to rainfall, the shortest day is the middle of winter even in places like India that have summer rains and monsoons,
The autumn equinox is actually the beginning of winter - the days are getting shorter,
I found Spinoza's God and not God
In addition, there can be half a year of darkness at the poles... where are your data from?
The length of the day does change!
http://www.calcalist.co.il/local/articles/0,7340,L-3619159,00.html
I wrote this because we would expect the shortest day of the year to be the height of winter, that is, the middle of winter and not the beginning of winter...
It is important to note that the Earth's climate has a late ignition, so the peak of winter is precisely in January and February.