Astronomical Change Sweeping Globe (Clickbait Propaganda Title 2024–25)
Feels great to be honestly dishonest
I don’t know all — or even the most famous — reasons others might offer for a gradual change ever predicted to manifest over specifically identified points on earth…just as tourists gathered at feasible locations from Mazatlan to Newfoundland to see a total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. But astrologers (not to be confused with astronomers) who go deeper than popular columns could certainly come up with astronomical events that would sound plausible to devotees, and whether more mystically inclined writers believe in astrology, they might offer a rationale for whatever prediction; a popular one in the coming months might be the coming to power of such an unusual and polarizing president.
How to Write Fraudulently
But as you really absorb what I’m saying, your awareness might prompt you to consider the level less scrupulous experts in a field you’re sufficiently with might explore in appealing to others. But please don’t be put off by critics when attempting to share the knowledge of your passion; you probably know better than most others that telling your truth accurately can be prone to calls of uncertainty by fanatics who care about selling its controversies rather than its contributions. And, while I’m not professionally involved is astronomy, but that doesn’t keep me from the temptation of TMI (too much information).
If you get the sense of how specialized knowledge can be misused to make a point, and this article has inspired you to be alert for such examples and to impart them, then it has already fulfilled its purpose — but you may want to linger anyway out of curiosity or to really understand details of how the importance of communication can be misapplied these days.
My references to propaganda and dishonesty relate to my compulsion to look for the merest truth in an article even if I ought to know better instead of resigning myself to accepting what I’m presented with is likely a hoax or delusion; part of me thinks (or “knows”) an avenue of cleverness that a high-minded fraudster might cling to with greater pride so they wouldn’t have to resort to sheer mendacity — and the immature but intellectual part of me yearns for technical honesty, even in a grosser but more aptly described atmosphere of deception.
Not that I (typically) resort to such myself. But while acceptance that a certain amount of lesser behavior exists might be pragmatically healthier, I feel more secure searching for more dubious rationales than accepting an unknown amount of easier answers.
Now, what is true in my headline?
It applies to an accurately predicted event for 2024–2025 in the sense that regularly recurring events will repeat each year (and even some that aren’t so obvious can be predicted millennia in advance, like the date of Easter each year based on the full moon if one’s computing tools and data are sufficiently fine). But to be technically correct, even almanacs state that sun and moon positions and times near the polar regions can’t always be stated with great accuracy.
But other than that, the dates of the map locations showing a procession from Iceland in December to Malaysia in February are correct…but they’d be just as correct if each point so marked on the map were replaced with latitude circles for each date given, as location examples later in the article will show. I hope they reveal themselves gradually enough so the contrast of mere latitude with the specific points in the above map really stands out!
The dates represent the latest sunrise of the year. To avoid any confusion caused by the time change, all times from any source are for Standard Time at each point, without regard for Daylight Savings or Summer Time in any case.
Many people would expect the latest sunrise of the year (in the northern hemisphere) to be on or about December 21 (depending on when the next leap year is) — the shortest day of the year. In this article, of course, shortest day is used colloquially to mean the time between sunrise and sunset in the northern hemisphere; those who engage in truly refined calculations are aware that the longest full days during the year — as measured between consecutive days at midday — are during December and January. In fact, while the larger point of this article is about scientific writing, the specific science used as an example is related to this fact.
Those of you with a refined sensitivity to calendar events may have long sensed that Christmas is not within weeks of the latest sunrise unless you’re very far north (even if you couldn’t explain why). At the risk of TMI, I’ll keep this “horrendously” short for the curious.
Having taken an astronomy class, you might recall being told that earth is closest to the sun on January 4 — which might especially surprise the approximately 90% of earth’s population not living in South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand or islands in the southern hemisphere. You might also remember something about Kepler’s second law of planetary motion, which states that the speed of a planet’s orbit increases as its closeness to the sun does. It is more familiarly pictured as two triangles representing two identical periods of an orbit being the same size even s their distance varies. I hope this helps, but in harmony with Medium’s recommended image copyright guidelines I declined to search for or trouble to create a facsimile.
Say you live in Tokyo; this means that earth travels further through space from the time the sun is “overhead,” or to the south, from one day to the next during December and January. You may recall learning that a rotation of the earth — with respect to a distant star) is 23 hours, 56 minutes (and 4.1 seconds), whereas a day is (on average) 24 hours. (When I first learned this as a kid I didn’t notice the distinction and arrogantly assumed lazy humans adopted the 24-hour day for convenience.) The difference is due to the additional rotation (slightly less than one degree per day — on average) required for the same longitude of the earth to be centered under the sun’s rays.
Since the sun is closest from November to February, the extra daily time described above adds up each day…to the point that on February 11 the sun sets 31 minutes later than it does on November 4, when the length of day is about the same. This is resolved during the other parts of the year. By the way, this is why North American Daylight Savings Time ends in November but starts in March, which is much further from the solstice. The fact that similar time adjustments like British Summer Time don’t exactly correspond could reflect cultural practices.
I hope such a “simple” explanation hints at the resources available to experts in other fields who rely on complexity (absent the best motives).
The Relevant Technical Details
You can refer to timeanddate.com to find out more about this than anyone would want to know for a month of days for just about any place, At the risk of appearing ignorant of more populous and perhaps sophisticated (but less driven) Scandinavia, I’ll select Fairbanks, Alaska (latitude 64.8 degrees north) as North American drivers — or, rather, atlas readers — might have an awareness of how far north that end of the continent’s highway system and sizable cities run. (If you’d like to try comparisons suggested below you might want to save windows for different locations.) The website will show that December 20 is indeed the shortest day (for 2024), whereas the daily rise and set times show the latest sunrise being at 10:58 on December 26. That’s because, at such a high latitude, the winter solstice is a much stronger indicator of the early sunset than the day occurring earlier than usual due to the Equation of time. Of course, this exercise would be pointless to attempt much north of the Arctic Circle near the solstice as the sun would rise very few days.
I’ll show you what I mean by looking at charts for Singapore (latitude 1.3 degrees north). The earliest sunset is the same on December 19 and 20 (since this was a leap year, the solstice is earlier than it would be otherwise) — but it isn’t until January 31 through February 19 that the sun rises at 7:16.
To round out the picture I’ll pick a location in between. It could be anywhere, but I’ll select Key West, Florida (latitude 24.6 degrees north) to tie everything together as it is the southernmost city in the continental U.S. and just north of the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees latitude), to help demonstrate there’s nothing magical about the tropics is this — or most any other — aspect of astronomy. While the solstice remains December 20, the year’s latest sunrise is revealed to occur during January 11–15 at 7:13.
Hopefully these few details from such a limited range of locations convey how a mere change of latitude can honestly (but extremely misleadingly) suggest a radically different event. If you’re an expert on aspects of, say, the economy, technology, learning, sociology, or medicine (or so many others), I hope you will enjoy the inspiration to discover (and expose!) such tricks that a writer might use in your field.
And may you and your readers be helped by keeping in mind that most sciences find it difficult to boast of sudden or distinct transitions. Not to get political about climate change (though I prefer the more traditional term global warming to call attention to how the urgency changes over time), but scientists, in the interest of accuracy, offer politically unsatisfying, ambiguous conclusions that experts might not deem laypeople worthy of appreciating. For example, statements about human influence on climate can be interpreted to assign the presence of much or little influence.
And since others have predicted upheaval through this February, why not plan to increase your influence now? ;)
At the risk of appearing even less human than I am, I experienced massive restraint in delving into a minimum of astronomy to make the article’s relevant points about propaganda. Readers with a greater wonk penchant will be happy to know I look forward to an article along the lines of explaining how to read an astronomical almanac (or even the Old Farmers’ Almanac, homespun though it be). If self-study doesn’t satisfy you, I hope my explanations of rise and set angles, twilight times and time differences by latitude do.
What follows is a non-lineal map of this phenomenon in Europe, in case it helps show that a linear global path is meaningless.
