The likely source of Stonehenge's giant sarsen stones What did our ancestors know about all this? Since the summer solstice in June, days have been progressively becoming shorter in the Northern Hemisphere and the nights longer for the past three months. (That’s why it stays light for so long each day during the summer in places such as Scandinavia.) Those are the solstices, and they have the most extreme differences between day and night, especially near the poles. The effect is at its maximum in late June and late December. This discrepancy in sunlight is what triggers the seasons. That positions one hemisphere of the planet to get more sunlight than the other for half of the year’s orbit around the sun. However, the axis tilts at 23.5 degrees, as NASA explains. It’s called the axis, and this rotation is what gives us day and night. The Earth rotates along an imaginary line that runs from North Pole to South Pole. She said that “meteorologists and climatologists prefer to use the ‘meteorological calendar’ because not only do the dates not change – making it easy to remember – but also because it falls in line more with what people think traditional seasons are.” “For example, December 10, most people would consider winter, but if you are using the astronomical calendar, technically that is still considered autumn because it is before the winter solstice.” “This makes some dates tricky,” Chinchar says. Meteorological seasons are defined as the following: March 1 to May 31 is spring June 1 to August 31 is summer September 1 to November 30 is autumn and December 1 to February 28 is winter. How old is Machu Picchu? More than previously thought Is the autumn equinox the official first day of fall? You can click here to see more cities (rounded down by one minute and adjusted for Daylight Saving Time). Going farther east, Dubai marks the exact event at 5:03 a.m.įor residents of Bangkok, it’s 8:03 a.m. For residents of Madrid, Berlin and Cairo, it comes at 3:03 a.m. Out West in San Diego and Vancouver, that means it arrives at 6:03 p.m.īut go in the other direction across the Atlantic Ocean, and the time change puts you into Friday. It comes at 8:03 p.m in Mexico City and Chicago. However, it will be 1:04 UTC according to the Royal Museums Greenwich and the US National Weather Service.įor people in places such as Toronto and Washington, DC, that’s 9:03 p.m. The equinox will arrive at 1:03 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) Friday, September 23, according to NASA and. The sun rises behind the Washington Monument in the US capital. Precisely when does the fall equinox happen? Here are the answers to some of your fall equinox questions:įrom our CNN Fast Facts file: The term equinox comes from the Latin word equinoxium, meaning “equality between day and night.” More on that farther down in the article. There’s a good explanation (SCIENCE!) for why you don’t get precisely 12 hours of daylight on the equinox. Well, there’s just one rub – it isn’t as perfectly “equal” as you may have thought. For people south of the equator, this equinox actually signals the coming of spring.įolks right along the equator have roughly 12-hour days and 12-hour nights all year long, so they won’t really notice a thing on September 22.īut during the equinox, everyone from pole to pole gets to enjoy a 12/12 split of day and night. If you reside in the Northern Hemisphere, you know it as the fall equinox (or autumnal equinox). On Saturday, we enter our second equinox of 2018. Twice a year, everyone on Earth is seemingly on equal footing – at least when it comes to the distribution of daytime and nighttime.
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