My favorite part of the season just occurred! Over an hour ago the Earth swung past the winter-most spot in its orbit. That was at 17:11 UTC, 12:11 PM on the east coast of the USA, 9:11 AM on the west coast, and the rest of you will just have to do the math.
We’re headed back towards summer! (Ironically, today is also the first official day of winter.) It’ll take a few days before we can notice the growing daylight — it’s somewhat similar to how you pause for a moment when you turn and reverse direction. If the snow ever melts off my skylight, I’ll be able to start watching the patch of sunlight start working its way down again.
So Beauteous Winter Solstice to you all!
And many more!
That’s all I wanted to say today. If you’re really bored, you can watch my YouTube movie of the Earth spinning through its seasons:
I spent months in space shooting the thing, so I hope you enjoy it! (You believe me, don’t you?)
Astronomy Picture of the Day, December 22, 2007
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Logos con carne 
December 21st, 2013 at 2:36 pm
I hope your bone mass is building itself up again since you came back to earth….
December 23rd, 2013 at 12:14 pm
She believes me! Yay!! 😀
Yes, quite nicely, thanks! You can barely even tell there was ever any difference now! 🙂
December 22nd, 2013 at 10:05 am
LOL I can humour you and say I believe you if you’d like =P
Winter sucks sometimes but makes for some amazing snowy scenery. I’m deciding to enjoy this one as much as possible 🙂
Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones and have a happy holidays!!!
December 23rd, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Oh, I am quite, as the youngsters say these days, “down” with being “humoured” (you crazy Canadians and your spelling… so colourful!!). 😀
All us Winter Folks have to make that decision (or go maaaaaaaaad… maaaaaaad, I tell you). All that ice-sculpture, winter festival, hot chocolate, snow fort, Robert Frost snowy woods, bright light Christmas stuff? It’s all just a distraction from the dark and cold and ice (maaaaaad, I tell you; stark raving, butterfly net, white coat, heavily medicated maaaaaaad!).
All seriousness aside, lovely to see you dropping by for a holiday snog! I trust all is well. Merry Christmas to you and yours, and Tiny Tim us every one! 😀
December 28th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
LOL uh oh, don’t get all delirious on me now 😉
Hope you had a wonderful Christmas. Now to bring in the New Year with some cheer!!
December 29th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Me, delirious? It is to laugh out loudly! I’m not delirious; you’re all delirious! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!! (Was that enough “ha”s? I’m never sure how many there should be.)
As for New Year’s Eve, I love any holiday where the main beverage is Champagne! My tip: fresh strawberries in the glass! They soak up the ‘pagne (and flavor it ever so slightly), and when the glass is empty, they are Y.U.M.M.Y!
December 24th, 2013 at 7:27 pm
Wyrd, when we lived in Germany the seasons shifted very perceptibly thanks to being so much farther north than swampy DC. The swift change of daylight, combined with the Germans’ penchant for traditions that come around like clockwork, brought the change of seasons forward in my consciousness, and time just seem to fly.
Panama, by contrast, was pretty much the same all the time. The only change we got was wet season – dry season. Oh, the Christmas decorations would go up, but it just didn’t seem real somehow. It was just an eternal tropical beach.
One more musing on winter and hot chocolate: when I was in Moscow, I went skating in Gorky Park (they flooded the walkways so you could skate all over the park, and they had a large rink in the middle for pick-up hockey games). I noticed that the kiosks there sold beer and ice cream. I asked why they served ice cream in zero-degree-Fahrenheit weather. Answer: “Because it doesn’t melt.”
December 25th, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Yeah, Germany is pretty far north! All of it is further north than I am in Minneapolis/St.Paul. It would have been worse there had it not been for that Atlantic current. England would be really chilly without it!
Los Angeles suffers from that same seasonal doldrums. Christmas lights on palm trees. Meh! 😕
Gorky Park! That’s impressive!! Serving ice cream sounds very… Russian.
Merry Christmas!!
December 25th, 2013 at 8:57 pm
Thanks Wyrd! One thing about Gorky Park… in the novel, the premise was that the murdered bodies were hidden under the snow all winter and only discovered in the spring. Pffft. There isn’t any place to hide ANYTHING in Gorky Park, snow or not.
If you’re curious to see the park-as-ice-rink, search for images of “Gorky Park winter.”
December 26th, 2013 at 10:56 am
The movie version of the novel is one film they’ve apparently never done Closed Captioning for (at least, no version I’ve tried to watch has had it), so it’s a bit inaccessible to me. Same with The Name of the Rose, which I’ve tried to watch for years (the book and movie were favorites of my dad).