Today has been the Summer Solstice in Britain and this time will have been the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a little confusing how the solstices appear to move around. This is mainly because of leap years and the fact that the year is not exactly 365 days long in reality. I think there’s another explanation too, but I have difficulty remembering what it is. It’s also the case that Earth’s axis is precessing, which moves the position in the year of the solstices, and also the eccentricity of our orbit and the position of the points where we’re closest to and furthest from the Sun gradually change, although this may not be directly linked to the equinoctes and solstices.
One of the peculiarities of living in these isles compared to North America is that we’re a lot further north than either people living in North America or we think we are. This is of course because our climate is currently strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream. A dramatic way of illustrating how close to the North Pole we really are is to consider our position relative to the Alaskan Panhandle, which extends from 54°43′ to around 62° North. The southern figure is also the latitude of Hartlepool, and the whole of Scotland is north of that latitude, as is about half of Ulster. The northernmost point of Scotland, Out Stack (and not Muckle Flugga as many claim) is about 60°51′ North, meaning that most of the Panhandle is actually south of the Shetlands. As for the Aleutians, they extend as far south as 51° North, which is even south of most of Kent.
Anyway, one of the consequences of this is that even in England we get a six week period around the Summer Solstice where it doesn’t get properly dark. Today, the Sun will set at 10:42 pm on Muckle Flugga and sunrise tomorrow there will be 3:29 am. Compare that to Le Marais de Samarès in Jersey, which is more or less the southernmost point of any part of the Atlantic which might be considered to be entangled officially with our government, where the sunset will be at 9:17 pm and tomorrow’s sunrise at 5:03 am. The midpoint between those two, or rather the closest point on land to it, is the Northumberland village of Boulmer, where sunrise tomorrow will be 4:24 am and sunset tonight will be 9:52 pm. I feel a bit twitchy about the idea that Boulmer, which is only thirty-seven kilometres from Scotland, is in a sense the midpoint of this political entity. This gives us a maximum apparent length of summer solstice night for these three places, north to south, of four hours and forty-seven minutes, six hours and thirty-two minutes and seven hours forty-six minutes, or so says my brain calculator. However, this isn’t the whole story because the Sun will not just cut out when it sets, and this means, for example, that the stars, or strictly speaking any other stars than the Sun, will not become visible for quite some time sunset and will also disappear considerably before sunrise. And even here in the English Midlands it doesn’t get completely dark.
This might sound wonderful to someone living closer to the Equator, and I admit that I’d like to see the midnight Sun one day, but in fact I find it a complete pain, as do many other people. It makes it difficult for people to sleep and the long days also seem to stir people up and agitate them into “midsummer madness”. Last night I went to bed before sunset, which is always disconcerting. Patients I’ve had with mental health issues, particularly those who are bipolar, often find themselves entering a manic phase at this time of year. It’s sometimes felt like a race against time when a client has started to report problems or behave in a manner which is cause for concern several days before the solstice and knowing that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent the main precipitating factor from getting worse for a week or more, and double that time coming out of the other side, by which time the person may have done something to themselves which may have a long-term impact on their well-being. It isn’t just bipolar either, because poor sleep is involved in other mental health issues. It’s now thought that the correlation of poor sleep with mental health problems is not causative, but I find myself K-skeptical of that because sleep deprivation clearly does have an adverse influence on it. The worrying and rumination which occur for many when they’re lying awake is not going to get better if it’s too light for them to sleep well, and paranoia and schizophrenia do seem to be triggered by it. This feels sometimes like a train bearing down on one at full speed because obviously we live on a massive great rock with a huge amount of momentum and it isn’t feasible or even desirable just to flip it into an upright position with respect to its orbit, which would in any case probably trigger a mass extinction and cause the ice caps to melt. We can’t live without seasons either.
There’s also the spiritual aspect. Judaism, Christianity and others do have a midwinter festival and this makes sense psychologically because it counteracts the misery of the cold and dark, and also the fact that many sources of food have shut down for the winter so we have to rely on all that is safely gathered in, but a midsummer festival isn’t as celebrated in the Abrahamic tradition today, although of course it is a big thing for Neo-Pagans. Like Xmas, Midsummer is for some reason considered to be several days after the solstice. I don’t know why this is, although if one regards today as the beginning of summer, which it is astronomically (i.e. declared to be so by the astronomical community), summer ought to be over by the start of July. Clearly it isn’t, although it does seem to be rather short here.
The summer solstice is one of those astronomical events which is almost the opposite of an astronomical event, along with the Full “Moon”. It makes it harder to observe the night sky, and in the latter case harder to see details on Cynthia herself as well as fainter objects in the sky at the same time. This issue makes the observation of the Jewish Sabbath more complicated far from the Equator. According to Halakha, which does not speak for all Jewish traditions, the Sabbath ends when three stars are visible in the night sky on Saturday evening. Within the polar circles this may not happen for weeks at a time, and even in England there can be a problem, not least because it tends to be cloudy as well. The alternative is to look at a white and a blue string until it’s no longer possible to distinguish their colours. This too can be a tall order in these parts of the world at certain times of year. As with some other cultures, this links to a timekeeping system where hours vary in length according to the length of daylight and night because of the interval between sunset and when this is no longer possible. In physiological terms it means the point from which the blue wavelength cone cell no longer functions, and in my mind it raises the questions of visual impairment, complete colour blindness and the extent to which the blue string is dyed. In a way, this is not my problem but in another way it is because I want to observe the Sabbath “properly”, even though I’m not Jewish, because mindfulness on the rituals is spiritually significant. In the Church of England, there are a number of sacraments, including the Eucharist and Baptism, and as an ex-deputy church warden it has been my rôle to prepare for both. Pouring water into a font and wine into a chalice are similar experiences, to be done mindfully, almost as a form of meditation, taking care not to spill any and although it’s vital to avoid idolatry, these liquids become charged with spiritual cathexis. The same applies to beginning and ending the Sabbath, and although I also feel that I’m engaging in cultural appropriation here, am I doing so to a greater extent than when I practice Yoga? If it makes it easier for me to behave compassionately towards others by practicing this, I don’t understand why I shouldn’t do it. It’s all rather complicated.
Islam, a proselytising universalist faith to which I ironically feel much less drawn, also has issues when practiced far from the Equator, mainly because of Ramadan. Because in terms of the solar calendar Ramadan cycles through the year, the requirement neither to eat nor drink during daylight hours is difficult to fulfil near the poles because of twenty-four hour daylight for some of the year, although there are rulings regarding this, and also ad hoc practices. Some people, for example, decide to use the time of sunset and sunrise in Mecca to time their fast. A similar problem exists with the qibla for Muslims in low Earth orbit, because this constantly shifts. I was once curious about the antipodes of Mecca and found that it was, as expected, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean but nonetheless close to Mururoa, since at that location the qibla is in all directions, bringing to mind the possibly apocryphal story about the Sikh guru who fell asleep in a mosque with his feet pointing at the qibla, and on being awakened and made aware of this fact saying “point my feet in a direction where Shabad is not”. I’m afraid my memory of this is rather sketchy and I apologise for that, and for my terminology.
I don’t want to problematise the solstice though. I’m aware that as I’ve been writing I’ve mainly used this post to complain about the negative side of this day. It’s also a day of high energy, with exuberant plant growth, animals foraging over a longer period of time and feeding their young and so forth. It’s also a breeding season for many species, which makes me wonder if it was in the distant prehistoric past. Would this also have been the time of year that non-avian dinosaurs were displaying, performing courtship rituals and tending their young, for example? Is there a way of knowing? Or were there fewer reasons to do so because the seasons were different and the climate was warm throughout the year? Does it depend on that or is the signal simply the longer days, used to coördinate breeding behaviour?
I have occasionally decided to stay up all night near the solstice, notably in ’86 although that year I actually did it on 26th June. Until very recently, I had never seen a sunrise and in my attempt to do so then I also failed because after a while I realised I was looking at a street lamp from a great distance. There is a problem with deciding when sunrise and sunset really happen if you don’t live in a relatively flat and featureless environment, because the Sun will only appear over the skyline and not the horizon, which is an abstract concept in most places I’ve been. However, there are a few places in Great Britain where one can genuinely see the horizon at sea level, without it being interrupted by land, and where this is in the West, a rarer circumstance than the East, it’s possible to witness the “green flash” and the “green ray”. These are optical phenomena taking place at sunrise or sunset, but the chances of being around to see the sunrise are lower. For a second or two as the Sun becomes invisible or visible behind Earth’s limb, and the air is clear, refraction separates the colours of sunlight and Rayleigh scattering – the cause for the sky being blue – is removed from what’s visible to the eye. Because the shorter wavelengths of light are bent differently than longer ones, the visible portion of the Sun is then green-looking. Sometimes this takes the form of a ray projecting from the horizon. It’s also enhanced by shimmering air, which I think probably makes it more likely at sunset when the air is warmer, and also quite rare in Britain. Hence one likely place for it to be seen is in West Cornwall, which is warmer and faces the Celtic Sea rather than the Irish.
To finish, I want to mention in passing an idea used in the excellent ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers‘ concerning what would happen on a planet orbiting one of the companions of α Centauri. Although there are close binaries around which habitable planets might have stable orbits, one would expect most of them to have a second companion at a distance from the first, i.e. the closest, and therefore there would be a period during which there were two suns in the daylight sky and another when the other sun lit the night sky. This would effectively provide conditions close to daylight around the clock when the planet was on the same side of the star as its companion, and since the stars are also orbiting each other this constant daylight condition would shift around the calendar, sometimes occurring in winter, sometimes in summer. In the book, this is almost as important to the ecosystem as the seasons, with some plants only growing when the night sky is also lit and animals emerging from eggs during this period alone, along with more complex animals using the period to feed their offspring to maturity more quickly. This raises the question of what would happen on a planet with two close binary companions within its orbit, such as the Trojan used for a series of stories including one by Asimov called ‘Sucker Bait’. A Trojan body is one orbiting in an equilateral triangle with two others, the most notable examples in this Solar System being the Greek and Trojan “camps” of asteroids sixty degrees behind and ahead of Jupiter in the same orbit. Two similar Trojan stars would provide 240° of daylight to a planet of this kind, meaning that if it had a twenty-four hour day it would average only eight hours of night. If the stars were of different luminosities and/or spectral types, the colour of sunlight would also vary throughout the day, and if there were a significant axial tilt, things would be even more complicated.
But we live on Earth, and sadly will probably never leave, so at least we won’t have to consider how to observe the Sabbath or Ramadan on other planets.
Happy Solstice!
A Box Of Chocolates 