This newspaper hits the stands on Thursday, the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. It happened just before sunrise, when Earth stood perfectly sideways to the Sun. The media often celebrates this by saying that, «Day and night are equal.» But some people must surely glance at local sunrise and sunset listings and see that this day’s sunshine were a few minutes longer than night plus twilight. The culprit is our atmosphere, which bends the sun’s image upward. But, hey, it was close enough.
A bunch of other things, oddly unmentioned in the mass media, also happen on the equinox. Only on the equinox, today, does the sun rise and set precisely due east and west. So you can easily figure out which windows of your home face where. Also, only on the equinox does the sun move in a perfectly straight line across the sky. A camera’s time exposure shows the sun following a curving path every other day. From tomorrow all the way until late September, the Sun’s daily track will be an arch in the shape of a huge rainbow.
The 26-millennium wobble in our axis makes the sun’s equinox position creep westward against the background stars. Of course we’d only directly see that if there happened to be a total solar eclipse on March 20, which will actually occur in nine years, as seen from parts of Africa and the Middle East. Seeing the equinoctial Sun against the background stars would have revealed that two millennia ago it happened in the constellation Aries. In the year 69 B.C. the equinox Sun moved into Pisces where it›s been ever since. But if you’re waiting to commence the Age of Aquarius, don’t hold your breath. The spring equinox will first occur in front of the constellation depicting a stick figure carrying a huge water vase in the year 2597. You’ve got to kill another 600 years before the age of harmony and understanding, if you took to heart the lyrics in the hit musical Hair.
Meantime, today’s equinox is a time when earth and sky are almost poetically united in symmetry and balance. Worth celebrating. And maybe trying to balance some eggs.
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