Winter Solstice 2015 and on to Winter!

ski3pin

ski3pin

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8:49 PM tonight and winter is here! Our home will be filled with pagan rituals as we celebrate the holiday! Happy Winter Solstice everyone! :)
 
Our solstice windstorm is beginning. Predictions of gusts to 65 mph here in the Willamette Valley. With the saturated ground, that could be a real bad time with trees.
 
Well...I'm not in any hurry for the Sun to "return" too soon. I like winter -- it's the season when fewer folks are out wandering the West, and the Big Empty is even emptier.

And the with the sun "away", gone south, it's easier to get dawn light photos while sleeping in to a reasonable hour. ;) And the sun is at a "good light" angle for more of the day.

The Sun in the trough of the sine curve isn't all bad! :)

gallery_2431_332_83942.gif


On the weather front, in Bend, OR: We had about an inch of snow yesterday and overnight, and then it started raining this morning so there's a layer of very wet slop -- fortunately not very thick.
And we have the High Wind Warning, too.
 
Good to know the date and time. Having an interest in the exact time of day for solstices and equinoxes, a few days ago I looked it up. I saw 22 December and "something: 49" and the rest escaped me. So I was not thinking "today's the day" until seeing this thread. The date I read was correctly given--for Greenwich Mean Time, where the winter solstice will occur at 0449 hrs GMT. We're GMT - 5:00 hrs here on the East Coast, so the moment of the solstice falls on 21 December throughout the USA.

Foy
 
...winter solstice will occur at 0449 hrs GMT...
Click to expand...
I've always used the US Naval Observatory database of astro/almanac times/dates for my "duties" compiling info for the ONDA Wild Desert Calendar. And the USNO website says the winter solstice is 22 Dec, 04:48 UT ("Universal Time", aka "GMT"). And Sky and Telescope also says 04:48 UT.

But a search on the Web does show a number of other sources saying :49.
:unsure:
I haven't seen any source that provides more resolution than Minutes, so don't know if it's a question of rounding...?

Doesn't really matter...except for pagan rites and rituals, where you want to avoid offending the gods with imprecision.
 
Hmm, that is awful close to bedtime. Might have to take a nap to make it to that point. Although the way is it snowing now, and supposed to keep dumping, might be out with the snowblower.
 
Just to make you feel good on this winter solstice, in Fairbanks, AK, the sun rose at 10:59AM and sunset was 2:40 PM with an evening low of -13 tonight. So with that be happy.


Have to pay for the summer midnight sun.
 
An evening low of only -13 in Fairbanks this time of year is quite balmy

Sent from my SCH-I925 using Wander The West mobile app
 
Wandering Sagebrush said:
Our solstice windstorm is beginning. Predictions of gusts to 65 mph here in the Willamette Valley. With the saturated ground, that could be a real bad time with trees.
Click to expand...
We lost a big fir, probably 3'+ at the base. It fell across the far edge of our pond. Saturated soils, compounded by shallow soils due to an underlayer of what we call hardpan and below that, a layer of Chuckanut sandstone. It could also be due to neighbors logging the heck of the surrounding properties.

And, back to our subject: everyone have a great Solstice and here's to L O N G E R days!
 
We have a micro brewery in Superior, WI called the Thirsty Pagan. Pretty good pizza too! Happy Solstice! Need to go out and make a Snow Angel in what little snow we have, Bigfoot Dave
 
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