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Tag: winter solstice

  • Winter Solstice At Stonehenge

    Winter solstice has come and gone. On to the lengthening days!

    The winter solstice is marked by the smallest amount of daylight during the year, but not necessarily the coldest day. That tends to happen a month or so later, depending on where you live.

    The winter solstice has been celebrated through many centuries and cultures. This has been proven through the years as temples and monuments have been discovered that seem to mark a particular importance on the day of the winter solstice.

    For example, people have been flooding to England’s Stonehenge for years to celebrate the winter solstice as they suppose the ancients did centuries ago.

    Those in particular who regularly attend these winter solstice celebrations are modern druids.

    According to druidry.org, “Druidism is rooted in the culture and mythology of Western Europe – in particular in those cultures which have come to be known as Celtic, which stretch from Ireland and parts of Portugal in the West to France, Switzerland and Austria in the East. We first hear of it in the writings of Julius Caesar, who in about 50 BCE wrote that Druidism originated in Britain.”

    It continues of modern druidry, saying it “emerged out of two acts of rebellion during that fertile and tumultuous period of the 1960s. Virtually simultaneously, on both sides of the Atlantic, revolutions occurred in how Druidry was understood: in 1963 on the Carleton College campus in the USA a group called The Reformed Druids of North America was created as a humorous protest against mandatory Sunday morning chapel attendance, while the following year in England a historian, Ross Nichols, rebelled against the election of a new Druid Chief, and established his own group, The Order of Bards Ovates & Druids.”

    Hmm. Interesting. Anyway, they celebrate the winter solstice each year with fervor.

    At Stonehenge this year, a guy that calls himself Senior Druid King Arthur Pendragon explained that to them, the solstice celebrates the coming of the new sun.

    He said, “This is the dawn we’ve been waiting for, this is the dawn the ancients cared about so much.”

    Did you celebrate the winter solstice?

  • Winter Solstice – The Shortest/Longest Day Of The Year – And So Much More…

    It happens every year between December 20th and the 23rd, the first day of winter – the Winter Solstice – and this year it falls on Saturday, December 21, 2013 at 17:11 UTC.

    This is a time when the sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In other words, it is when the North Pole is tilted 23.5 degrees away from the sun.

    When this happens, every place on earth above a latitude of 66.5 degrees north remain in darkness, and below this latitude, get 24 hours of daylight. The winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year.

    You can use the Sunrise and Sunset calculator to find the number of daylight hours during the December solstice worldwide.

    Winter solstice happens when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere.

    It is a time of celebration for many cultures because it represents the end of winter’s darkness and the coming of spring. For many ancient civilizations that struggled to survive through harsh winter, the winter solstice was a time to be grateful for winter passing.

    Festivities and rituals, all over the world celebrate this significant change.

    In Poland the ancient December solstice observance – prior to Christianity – involved people showing forgiveness and sharing food. It was a tradition that can still be seen in what is known as Gody.

    In the NE corner of Pakistan and among the Kalash Kafir people, a seven day celebration takes place that includes the Winter Solstice. They take ritual baths for purification, they sing and chant with a torchlight procession and there is dancing and festival foods.

    The Mayan honored the sun god prior to the Christian influence, doing a dangerous ritual known as the flying pole dance.

    The ancient Incas celebrated with a special festival to honor the sun god.

    In the 16th century these kinds of ceremonies were banned by the Roman Catholics in their attempt to convert the Inca people to Christianity. However, the Quecia Indians in Cusco, Peru, brought back the festivals and celebrations in the 1950s. It is now a major festival that begins in Cusco and continues to an ancient amphitheater nearby.

    In the Neolithic and Bronze Age, Winter Solstice was a way for people to identify the actual time for harvests and sowing of new crops.

    However, the most common modern-day tradition of winter or summer solstice observed around the world is to view sunrise and sunset.

    Image via NASA

  • Winter Solstice: Prepare For A Really Long Night

    Saturday night, Dec. 21st will be the longest night of the year — it will be Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that North America will get only 9 hours and 32 minutes of sunshine as the night stretches on for more than 14 hours of darkness. The solstice will begin at 12:11 p.m. on Saturday.

    During this time, the sun will be overhead along the Tropic of Capricorn, at 23.5 degrees south. Locations north of the equator will see the sun follow its shortest arc across the southern sky. The Earth’s North Pole will be at its maximum tilt away from the sun. In Washington DC, the sun will be above the horizon for 9 hours and 26 minutes but the day will be even shorter for cities in Canada that are closer to the Northern Pole.

    The opposite will be the case in the Southern Hemisphere, as Earth’s South Pole will be pointing towards the sun, thus the Southern Hemisphere will have its longest day.

    File:Earth-lighting-winter-solstice EN.png

    After Dec 21, the nights will again start becoming shorter because the sun spends more time on the horizon until March 20 when there will be the same length of day and night because the axis of the Earth will be vertical.

    Again, the days will continue to grow longer through to the summer, and on June 21, we’ll experience the longest day of the year.

    Watch video of a short Arctic day

    Image via Wikipedia (1),(2)