Weird Science Cool Pic of the Week
If you took a picture of the Sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position?
The answer is no, and the shape traced out by the Sun over the course of a year is called an analemma.
The Sun's apparent shift is caused by the Earth's motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth's rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter.
The analemma pictured to the left was built up by Sun photographs taken from 1998 August through 1999 August from Ukraine.
Click on the image to embiggen (a bit).
Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
