Something really neat about the Sun

[Earthlover18]

I've been doing a lot of reading about astronomy latley and today I read about something called a solar analemma. Some of you may already know about it but I just wanted to share.

Basically it is the pattern created if the sun is photographed and ploted at the same daily time from the same location throughout the year. It has a different shape based upon where you are on the planet, but from mid-northern and southern latitudes it looks like this:



The vertical change is created by the Earth's tilt off of the ecliptic. The sun is at the lower section during the winter when tilted away from the sun. Then it is higher in the summer when the sunlight is hitting at a more direct angle. The horizontal change is caused by the Earth changing its speed relative to the sun during its eliptical orbit along the ecliptic.

I thought this was really neat (I love astronomy in case you haven't noticed ). But, after thinking about it some more, I realized something even more amazing. Is the pattern it creates not comparable to the infinity symbol? It is slighly mishaped and rotated, but nonetheless that is what it looks like!

I find it incredible that there is a hidden, natural geometric pattern created every year in the sky that is very similar to the symbol infinity. I think that is quite a sign that the cosmos truley is infinite.

[Fighter-of-Wars]

It is really neat. I used to have an old globe that had the symbol placed on to show where the sun was directly over.

[Human No More]

It also looks like the number 8 (trollface.png)

But yeah, that is actually interesting how it moves... I find astronomy very interesting