So it is the day, the commonly used day for a while back ( to the Celts at minima ) to plunge into winter in the more populated and popular Northern hemisphere of Earth. To boot, those countries that had not yet turned the clocks backward to daylight saving time did so last night. So that winter it is and there was the promise of a nice Post on what the transition means and used to mean, why we care less about it than we used too, etc but I had a nagging feeling about a referral link 10 odd days ago precisely enquiring about the reappearance of Orion constellation in the night sky which clearly opened to the wider question of the moving starfield above our heads. If the readers waiting for the philosophical poetry will pardon me, I’ll sketch that out quickly.
Like a spinning stone in a slingshot.
Let us consider our Sun first! It could be seen as a feature less fireball without top or bottom. Does it spin and if so to the right or left are questions that depend on where you approach it from in the vastness of space. There is one link between our star and the rest of the universe around it though which does give a level : the galaxy of which it is a component. The name of that level, the plane defined by the Sun’s rotation around the galactic center is the galactic ecliptic or plane. The Sun moves on its own all the while though and the plane of its “orbit”, or more rightfully path, intersects the galactic plane thus :
Click for link.
The angle is of about 60 degrees and leads the Sun’s movement in the galactic disk to be helicoidal, like that of a screw’s edge. Do note the image of intersecting planes as it will be used again soon. Thus if the Sun was our main reference point, we could expect the stars to change in a curving succession through our skies and it is just about like that save for the observer in this, you and I. For two things related to us are more important in considering the stars from the ground on Earth than the majestic ballet we just evoked. For one, our lifetime, that of the species mind you not individuals, is too short for that movement to be really apparent. Scientifically, we have noted many celestial changes since the observations made in Pharaonic Egypt or at Stonehenge but only due to the displacement of the Earth’s axis and continuous recording of the movements of our neighbouring stars is not 500 years old yet with detailed views of the Galaxy not a hundred. If we last as long again as we have so far and keep recording, we’ll have something to show. We can take the Sun as our local locus, reference point; apart for minute differences, this corkscrew path is not our main matter.
What is instead is the other pair of intersecting planes. The Sun now our center, the ecliptic for our planet would be the ellipsoid plane defined by its orbit around it, right. Well, it is but … Earth is a rebel and disregards the rules by being tilted, canted on its spinning axis ( revolution, turning on itself like a top that makes the day/night alternating by hiding us from the Sun ).
Click for link.
The turning on itself though smaller in degree beats the orbital one around the Sun for observational purposes because we have our feet planted on the ground ( and not the Sun’s happily for us ) and that turns around as we just reminded ourselves much faster than the orbit completes a turn. Again but this time on the individual level, our short lives and memories affect our choice of reference points. But we are here on Earth looking at the stars and in short, they are moving around according to the ecliptic but we look at them from the Equator! Our vision of the sky comes from the narrow path of the view from Earth’s width projected equally on both sides of that equator in the sky ( orange circle’s edge ).
It could look like this above except that the ribbon moves through space along the Earth’s orbit and that makes the stars appear to follow a helicoidal movement too ( like our galaxy roaming Sun ) sometimes dipping out of view below the horizon or rising high above it and at the same time moving laterally across the night sky in accordance to the rotation of our rocky home. In the shortest form possible, the stars seem to move ( it’s us that are moving ) across the sky because Earth spins and up and down more slowly over the horizon because Galileo was right, “e pur si muove”, it turns around the Sun.
Finally, the tilt in the axis is of course also the cause behind seasons as explained in a past Post ( here but sadly not the one found by my visitor from up there ), when the part of Earth you live in is tilted away from Sun it’s winter because less heat, which brings us back to winter.
Winters past.
We have lost the meaning of the celebrations we partake in around the year especially in Western civilization and friends lands. Winter is probably the best example of that. To the dwellers of New York or Seoul, Paris or Tokyo, the climatic conditions make it a nuisance, that’s about it. Even in the rural Northern USA or Canada, snow plowing covers most of the road network and makes life much easier than before, the same being true to a degree in Septentrional Europe. We play disguise on Halloween and learn quizzically about the donning of painted skeleton masks by the Mexicans without much of an idea where such things come from. For forgotten we have that winter used to be the time of death, for real as well as figuratively. The spirits rising to the surface of Sammain, the Dia de Muertos with ancestors remembered or the All Saints / Souls dual days of Christianity are all about impending death revived in the memories.
In the world of before the Industrial Revolution, November marks the time when, in a four seasons setting, all that can be grown is in dormance. All field products have been collected and stored. The farm is ready to fold protectively over itself. There is still some foraging and hunting to do to complete the stocks but any day now, the weather could take a turn for the worst from which it will not recover. Anything left undone is better be ready to wait until Spring. it also means that the rhythm of life will slow down and for the hard laborers ( prior to tractors and machines ), it is the time of rest, hibernation or vacation time depending on the location. In the dirt floor houses of the poor, packed in a single uninsulated building ( often single room ), with a finite reserve of food and wood for heat, a period of limbo begins from which the wider family unit prays to emerge unscathed all the while conscious that the old and the sick likely won’t make it.
I don’t think a single of my readers faces the upcoming winter in such quite dire conditions and my heart goes out to them if such is the case. Even once the era of the machines had brought niceties such as central heating along, the coal required to heat houses made the London of the 1880s filled with so much smoke and soot that sometimes the daylight never seemed to pierce the smog. In that respect too, modern times make for a more bearable winter. And yet, turning back to our stars and olde tyme rituals from above, it seems clear that we have lost touch with many of nature’s truths and lessons. The main reason for which is not the comfort itself but the system that allows it. The world wide economy knows naught of seasons for the hamster wheel it spins is cyclic not eccentric. It resembles the carpe diem and its affixed party night but ignores the tide of the seasons. Oh, for sure the people on the market floor on Wall Street or the Londonian City adjust their moves to follow availability of things ( say wheat ) but their gaze is firmly planted in the instantaneous transactions and the background of selfies taken in a restaurant’s bathroom do not show the rusting colors of trees falling asleep over New England’s Appalachian valley. Winter has stopped meaning sleep and death or at least fell second to such cosmic deadlines as income tax return.
And I think that is our loss. I am not being “passéist” ( stuck in the past ) for melancholy’s sake here on the contrary as it seems to me the two are essentially intertwined. What I sincerely believe is that we should still learn and experience if not live both sides of winter. For instance, the movement of the Earth in space was likely taught to the person that googled it and came to this blog but not learned or forgotten until at some point the movement struck them to check it out. Something as simple as a monthly night outing with the school, possibly with parents joining around on the sports field for stargazing with a few small telescopes and a resource person would make remembering about the stars and seasons easier, help in keeping touch between the content of that class way back in grade school about seasons and the context of the cold months and what they meant ( and still mean in places and for those that live of the land and feed us ). The present examination would resound even more there and then too, in the cold air with the wisps of visible breaths, facing the immensity and remembering our place in it.
We live on time borrowed on a spinning stone in a slingshot fast traveling through a galaxy lost in a sea of its siblings in a meaninglessly vast space. May we still profit of the slower rhythm winter brings nature and us within it to make a time of reflexion on that.
Peace out, Tay.
P.S. Going out to the countryside in the next few weeks for outings will show city folks what the second part of this Post covered and is a didactic tool for the kids especially if you visit a spot you went to during the summer for comparison.
Definitive Lapse of Reason 