Hang In There...Summer Will Return...I Think!!!

 

 

Ahhhh…..Remember those lazy warm 1000 Islands days along the river?  Well hang in there.  Here are some thoughts to help easy us through winter… Well maybe!!!

One of my hobbies is astronomy.  I keep close track of the seasonal positions of the Sun. Moon, stars and planets and other celestial events.  I even teach a survival  navigation course based in large part on these observations.

So here are few facts that might help.

In terms of distance the Sun is actually closer to us now in winter than summer.  It’s about 91 million miles from Earth now, and 93 million miles in summer.  .  Big deal right…it doesn’t feel like it!!!  It is actually the tilt of the Earth’s axis that matters more since the Sun is higher in the sky in summer and gives us more direct solar input in the N. hemisphere.

We are even now  on the downhill slide toward summer.  That actually started almost a month ago on the winter solstice of Dec. 21^st.  Now the days are getting longer.  Sunrises are earlier and sunsets later and each day the Sun  gets higher in the sky.  Each sunrise and sunset also creeps farther north on the horizon.

Winter officially by the calendar is about 90 days long.  That puts the middle of winter only about 2 weeks away around early Feb.  Sometimes my wife and I celebrate that marker by driving to Phoenix or other SW desert city in the “usually” warm desert and get a hotel with a pool and Jacuzzi under palm trees and sit and ponder and celebrate the middle of winter…defying it for a couple days. 

That is one thing I love about the desert SW and its radical changes in elevation were you can kinda enjoy a winter and a summer even on the same day with a few hours driving.  Being an eastern kid I still find that amazing.

Right now we are under the same eastern Pacific high pressure that is creating a severe drought in California.  Nice mild winter days for us and  hardly any snow left on the ground from good  storms before X-mas.  Our solar rooms reach nearly 100 degrees every day, and since the nights are still relatively cold in the teens and twenties we can still use that solar heat well into the evening.  The downside is, if we don’t get some real significant winter moisture soon our fire season will be terrible and early!

So hang in there, and enjoy some reminders of summer to come!