A photograph of the Sun taken at the same time every day will yield the visual pattern seen here, known as an analemma. The pinched, figure-8-like shape is due to the varying factors of the Earth’s orbit in space. (CÉSAR CANTÚ / ASTROCOLORS)

This Is How The Sun Moves In The Sky Throughout The Year

If you photograph the Sun at the same time every day, you get a bizarre figure-8 shape: an analemma. Here’s why.

At any time of day, you could theoretically set up a camera to take a picture of the landscape that encompasses the apparent position of the Sun in the sky. If you came back the next day at the exact same time, 24 hours later, you’d find that the Sun had changed its position ever-so-slightly. If you did this every day for a full year, you’d discover two important things:

1. The Sun would have returned to its starting point at long last, as the Earth returned to the same point in its orbit from a year prior.
2. The shape you traced out would look like a figure-8 with one loop larger than the other: a shape known as our analemma.

The fact that the Earth orbits the Sun once per year explains the first part. But the motion of the Sun in its particular analemma shape is due to a combination of deep reasons. Let’s find out why.

The Earth in orbit around the Sun, with its rotational axis shown. All worlds in our solar system have seasons determined by either their axial tilt, the ellipticity of their orbits, or a combination of both. (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER TAUʻOLUNGA)

The first major contributor to the Sun’s apparent motion is the fact that Earth…