It's been ready for a while, but now that vocals by Queen Bey have sprinkled stardust on the track, one of the most spectacular videos of the year is finally out.
And Charlie Robins' jawdropping video for Naughty Boy's Runnin (Lose It All) has to be an underwater-shot music video like none before it: a love story of a couple destined to come together by the fact they appear to live (and to run) under the sea.
As with his video for Klangkarussell's Netzwerk last year, Charlie Robins' inspiration has come from studying an extraordinary exponent of an extreme pursuit.
In this case it was free-diving world champion Guillaume Nery, and his filmmaker partner and fellow free-diver Julie Gautier, and their film Ocean Gravity.
It led to a collaboration – and this video has been co-directed by Gautier with Robins - that's a majestic accompaniment to the song.
"It wasn’t an easy video to get off the ground initially, though [commissioner] James Hackett was a firm believer from the moment we pitched Charlie’s idea to him in a brief email," explains producer Sarah Tognazzi.
"Strangely enough, James had already contacted Guillaume & Julie himself when initially hearing the track. This created an enormous synergy from everyone involved to get this video made."
There was only one place that an idea which required Nery to run along the sea-bed, and co-star (and fellow free diving champion) Alice Modolo to run upside down under the surface of the water, could be achieved.
That was a small channel off the coast of Rangiroa, a tiny atoll in French Polynesia, off the coast of Tahiti.
With crystalline waters, 27 C water temperature, a shallow depth of only 15 meters, allowing the sun to light the scene naturally, and the strongest current in the world, this was also where Nery and Gautier shot Ocean Gravity.
"These natural conditions allowed for the magical underwater effects to be achieved entirely in-camera, beautifully shot on the Dragon by Jacques Ballard, who had previously collaborated with Guillaume and Julie," explains Tognazzi.
As a result this video manages that very rare thing - to look impossible and real at the same time.
But the original idea regarding the underwater illusion of walking on water surface was initiated in 2014.
A group of freedivers in the Canary Islands have utilized their expertise to film an astonishing video of underwater illusions, in which they appear to walk on water, sit cross-legged on the ocean’s surface, and fly through the void like a superhero, before they are pulled from the sea in a scene reminiscent of a sci-fi movie.
The illusions are the handiwork of brothers Armando and Francisco del Rosario, according to the Daily Mail.
Shot by biologist Armiche Ramos, the stunning footage employs no computer generated effects, relying instead on the abilities the pair have developed as freedivers.
Though several camera tricks were utilized to create the underwater illusions, they amount only to altering its orientation.
"Walking On Water" Illusion
The trio, who call themselves the Ocean Brothers, filmed their illusions as part of an underwater photography competition, World Shoot Out.
Their entry, which was filmed in El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, won the prize for best short film.
“We didn’t use any special effects, just camera tricks and weights which were hidden inside the wetsuits,” Ramos said.
“People who watch it usually don’t know what’s happening, they think that the images are made by computer.”
The illusions took three years to record, as the freedivers were forced to wait for optimal conditions, according to Barcroft TV.
At one point, filming was suspended for a year, due to an active underwater volcano in the region.
“The location is not always calm and we had to wait for the correct moment for several months at a time,” Ramos noted.
As the video begins, one of the divers can be seen running on the surface of the ocean, though in reality he is inverted underwater. In another segment, a diver sits cross-legged on the water in a similar fashion, before one of them is filmed flying through the underwater world wearing a Superman-like cape.
In the final scenes of the video, one of the divers walks along a rock face, and is pulled out of the sea in a scene reminiscent of the iconic portal from Stargate.
Earlier this year, a group of freedivers in the Atlantic filmed a far different experience while underwater.
As the Inquisitr previously reported, one of the divers was rammed by a whale shark, unaware that the animal was behind him until the last second.
The underwater illusions created by the Ocean Brothers reveal not only the astonishing beauty of the world below the surface, but also the full potential of their skill as freedivers.
The cult Finnish yacht maker Nautor’s Swan seduces sailors with sleek and speedy designs. Come aboard its latest, most ambitious vessel, Leonardo Ferragamo’s Solleone
ABOUT SIX YEARS AGO, Paul Glimcher, a New York City neurobiologist and lifelong sea dog, was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean when a storm hit his 54-foot Nautor’s Swan sloop.
Even such an experienced sailor, who already had a round-the-world tour under his life vest, had to give this storm some consideration.
“Here we were 1,500 miles from land. The seas were running 16 to 18 feet and the wind speed was 40 knots [46 miles per hour],” remembers Dr. Glimcher.
So what did he do?
“We went below and baked bread.”
An ideal yacht exists in two worlds: the exterior one, in which the
bow gracefully slices through the “restless wave” of which the Navy hymn
sings, and the interior one, which is so comfortable that when the
going gets tough, the tough can bake bread.
Such wind palaces are rare,
and so are the owners who can afford them.
As a result, the names of
certain cult yacht makers—Oyster, Perini Navi, Wally, Royal Huisman,
Nautor’s Swan—are whispered with the same hushed pride that 0.1
percenters exhibit when saying “my Gulfstream” or “my Picasso.”
The distinctive teak deck features boards laid in parallel lines.
Photo : Martien Mulder for WSJ
It’s a
rarefied world, not just for the price tags, which can easily surpass
$10 million, but also for the costly upkeep, which involves a half-dozen
highly specialized crew members.
The gladiatorial communities that
gather around each brand are as competitive about their choices as they
are about the business endeavors that afforded them these boats in the
first place.
Nautor’s Swan’s club includes tech billionaire and
philanthropist Thomas Siebel and fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier.
“It’s a very strong boat. Both technically and aesthetically it’s great,” says Demarchelier, whose 53-foot Swan is called Puffy.
“Its lines are beautiful. I’ve used it for several shoots.”
“You
can tell a Swan just by the feel of the wheel—they’re incredibly
responsive. They carve the water really well, even in a squall,” says
California oil magnate Donald R. Macpherson Jr., who, as a boy, sailed a Nautor’s Swan with his father and who recently spent a year and a half overseeing the construction of Freya, his 90-foot Swan.
“I wanted to re-create the experience I had with my father with my own family,” he says.
Whereas
many other yachts are, like iPhones or high-end watches, amalgamations
of state-of-the-art components supplied by other companies, including
the latest push-button winches and sail trimmers, almost everything you
see on a Nautor’s Swan—from the deck hardware to the bilge pump
system—has been customized first in 3-D graphics on the company’s
computers and then by Nautor’s Swan’s own craftsmen in the remote
Finnish town of Jakobstad.
“You are creating self-contained worlds with
each boat,” says Heini Gustafsson, the senior designer of Nautor’s
Swan, where the smallest of the seven models currently offered is 54
feet long.
“It’s a unique place—where else can you get the chance to
design everything from the sheets to the cutlery?”
Teak samples from the
interiors of every yacht built are stored at the boat works so that
repairs and modifications can be made later.
The Swan 115 S, the new flagship of the SwanLine, under sail in the emerald waters of Sardinia
So it’s no surprise that the boat builder’s newest owner is the chief executive of a luxury fashion and lifestyle brand.
Leonardo Ferragamo, one of the six heirs of Salvatore Ferragamo, recently built one of Nautor’s Swan’s most audacious boats yet for
himself.
“I am so intrigued with it,” says Ferragamo, 62, his usually
calm boardroom voice rising with excitement.
As he sits in his Milan
office, his new racing yacht, the first Swan 115, Solleone, is
undergoing its initial trial in the northern Finnish seas near
Jakobstad.
“It’s already sailing at 15 knots [17.3 mph]—but I think it
will reach 25 knots [28.8 mph],” he says of the boat. (An average
sailboat usually cruises along at five or six knots.)
Jakobstad is a spotless, typically Scandinavian modernist town, built
around a 17th-century core of buildings, yet it’s an outlier in Finland.
It’s located on the Gulf of Bothnia, across the gulf from Sweden, and
most people here speak Swedish.
Visitors rarely hear the town called by
its official Finnish name, Pietarsaari.
Locals pronounce “no” with an
easy and joyous nej and “yes”—jo—with a hesitant
inhale.
Blessed by tall forests of raw material and protected granite
coves, this area has been a popular boat-building spot for three
centuries.
“Everyone here has a boat project in their backyard,” one local woman
told me.
“My father built our family’s 26-foot sailboat on our lawn.”
But the town was put firmly on the nautical charts in 1966, when paper
salesman and serial entrepreneur Pekka Koskenkylä launched the yacht
company that was to become Nautor’s Swan.
He had a vision of applying
Finnish functionalist design to making the speedy yet comfortable boats
that are today responsible for the private jets parked at the tiny local
airport.
Using his formidable salesman’s skills, Koskenkylä
convinced the world’s best-known naval architects, New York–based
Sparkman & Stephens—which is responsible for eight America’s Cup
winners—to work for his fledgling company.
Together they created yachts
that could sail with the best on the regatta circuit.
In 1974, a Swan 65
won the first-ever Whitbread Round the World Race—an annual Phileas
Fogg–type event, hatched by a group of thrill-seeking English tycoons
and now called the Volvo Ocean Race—earning Nautor’s Swan instant
prestige.
That inaugural half-year odyssey is still legendary among
sailing aficionados: Despite facing epically challenging conditions that
included 300-foot icebergs and 50-mile-an-hour winds, the Swan
prevailed.
In 1980, Germán Frers—a one-time Sparkman &
Stephens chief designer who had left to found his own eponymously named
firm—took over as Nautor’s Swan design guru, a position he retains.
He
had already created renowned crafts of the day including Beau Geste, Wizard of Paget, Quest of Paget and Simba,
and soon he designed a new Nautor’s Swan.
Its shallow hull, vertical
bow and narrow fin keel made the boats into clean and efficient sea
missiles.
Now, a half-century since its founding, Nautor’s Swan
has produced, hand-screw by hand-screw, some 2,000 boats, from the
relatively chubby cruising yachts of the ’60s and ’70s to the more
recent distinctive flush-deck, blue-banded boats.
But it hasn’t been all
smooth sailing.
In 1972, after a fire in the boatyard that proved
costly, Koskenkylä was forced to sell his company to the local paper
mill, and by the late ’90s it was suffering losses.
In 1998 Ferragamo,
the chief executive officer of Palazzo Feroni Finanziaria S.p.A, the
holding company for the family’s diverse businesses, stepped in and
bought a controlling interest in Nautor’s Swan.
A passionate sailor, he
already owned two Swans before taking over the boat works, and he has
since added another six to his stable.
“When I first got married, my
wife wanted a summerhouse and I wanted a Swan—I bought the Swan first,”
says Ferragamo, who visits the yard every two or three months.
“So when I
acquired the company, I already had such respect for the brand. I
recognized the enormous pride and craftsmanship that went into building a
Swan.”
Leonardo Ferragamo on board Sailing Yacht Solleone
After he became chairman, “initially there might have been some
suspiciousness from the Finnish side,” says Ferragamo.
“They might have
thought that I was just a decorator rather than someone with a long-term
plan.” Since he has arrived, more than 15 new Swan models have been
introduced, such as the popular yacht Swan 45, which was unveiled in
2001 and could be built in under a year, faster than the average Swan.
Meanwhile, carbon fiber soon replaced the older fiberglass hulls.
“There
were some rough patches,” agrees Marcus Jungell, the company’s sales
director.
“We Finns might seem a little introverted. They bring Italian
flair.”
The carbon fiber mast of a Swan 115 measures more than 150 feet
Photo : Martien Mulder for WSJ
The new 115-footer, of which Solleone is one of four thus
far, has been the most ambitious project resulting from the
Italian-Finnish collaboration.
A yacht of such enormous size is
challenging to design to racing specifications, and each one will cost
$16 to $22 million.
(But the company seems confident of its
success—there are already plans for a 130-foot Swan.)
I drove to Kållby,
8 miles inland, to have a look at one of them in what must be Finland’s
most unusual sauna: a long white-painted hangar where boat hulls and
other carbon fiber elements are electrically baked in the vacuum of
giant temperature-tolerant plastic bags.
Workmen in overalls were
carefully stretching out mats of laminate on the hull before wrapping
the whole thing in plastic, pumping out the air from beneath and warming
the ovens to 195 degrees.
It was as if Arthur Treacher had captured
Moby Dick.
This baking process is one of the first steps in a
115’s 20-month design and construction schedule. Carbon fiber is the
material of choice for anything designed for speed, from Formula One
cars to racing yachts, thanks to its enormous strength-to-weight ratio.
However, air is the great enemy; bubbles can create cracks and weaken
the overall structure.
“The old-fashioned way of hand-basting laminate
will still have 7 to 8 percent air content, even if you are good at it,”
says Thomas Lill, who oversees Nautor’s Swan’s composite process.
“Baking our hulls like this can reduce the air content to 0.5 percent.”
Down at the company’s harbor facility, Solleone
is tied to the harbor dock, its hull dwarfed by the 151-foot mast.
Workmen are still sanding the already-smooth teak deck.
Anders Bertlin,
the yacht’s project manager, pointed at our feet.
“See this? The planks
all line up straight. They don’t curve with the boat like others do.”
Indeed, the entire deck is lined like a bowling alley from stern to bow,
across all hatches.
This unusual aesthetic flourish, coupled with white
caulking, gives the deck a gleaming, elegantly minimalist feel—a
fantastical white saucer that floats a few feet above the choppy
lead-gray waters.
There’s also a practical reason for the smoothness of
the deck: fewer rope snags—the bane of sailors.
For the interior,
Ferragamo worked with his frequent collaborator, the Florentine
architect and interior designer Michele Bonan, to add Mediterranean
touches: Glossed teak paneling with customized wood shutters set off by
silver picture frames; door latches and drawer pulls cushioned with
stitched leather; stateroom headboards done up in red and blue percale;
and the all-important galley, set in the prime spot just forward of the
yacht’s center.
Perhaps most important, Solleone’s 11.5-foot keel can be
raised, allowing the boat to enter the shallower waters of most
harbors.
The 450-horsepower Scania diesel engine is muffled thanks to a
complex system of insulation—not even the silverware vibrates when it’s
fired up.
Ferragamo would doubtless like to have the same sense
of stability in the current world financial markets, which are choppy
waters for sales of super-yachts.
“Traditionally, our market was evenly
divided between the U.S., Northern Europe and the Mediterranean,” says
sales director Jungell, who adds that the current Mediterranean economic
climate is pushing them to pursue emerging markets like Russia and
China.
But looking at the new 115, one can’t help but suspect that this
newest venture is about something more than quarterly financial
statements.
There’s comfort in the fact that both Ferragamo and Nautor’s
Swan hail from cultures that take very long-term views of the business
of design.
“My family has a saying,” says Ferragamo.
“ ‘Heritage
is the foundation for the bridge you want to build.’ You need to
respect it but not just maintain it. With Nautor’s Swan, we want a
stronger drive toward evolution—never a revolution.”
Links :
Sailweb : Swan In the Begining - Swan 36 Tarantella
Britain's seabirds are in crisis. Catastrophic breeding failures have swept along our shores and have hit many of our colonies of puffin, arctic tern, guillemot..
Every day for sixty million years, seabirds have performed mind-boggling acts of derring-do: circumnavigating the globe without rest, diving more than 200 meters in treacherous seas for a bite of lunch, braving the most unpredictable weather on the planet as if it were just another Tuesday and finding their way home in waters with few, if any, landmarks.
The Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) undertakes the longest known migration of any animal, travelling from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back each year.
The IUCN Red List considers the species as Least Concern, but its population is in decline.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
But now seabirds, like so many other species, may have met their match.
Conservationists have long known that many seabird populations are in decline, but a recent paper in PLOS ONE finds the situation worse than anticipated.
According to the researchers, seabird abundance has dropped 69.7% in just 60 years – representing the deaths of some 230 million animals.
“I was very surprised with the result, it was considerably greater than I’d expected,” said Edd Hammill, co-author of the paper, with Utah State University.
“What we should take away from this is that something is serious amiss in the oceans.”
Ben Lascelles, a Senior Marine Officer with Birdlife, who was not involved in the study, said he found the research alarming because the decline appeared practically indiscriminate, hitting a “large number of species across a number of families.”
The Brown Booby (Sula leucogaster) is listed as Least Concern and is found throughout the pantropical oceans.
However some populations are suspected to be in decline owing to disturbance and unsustainable levels of exploitation.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
Seabirds, which include any bird that depends largely on the marine environment, comprise nearly 350 species worldwide – an astonishing variety of extreme-loving birds.
For example, the indefatigable wandering albatross, which sports the largest wingspan on the planet; the child-sized Emperor penguin, the only bird that breeds during the Antarctic winter; and the tiny storm petrel that practically capers on the water as it feeds – they are named for St. Peter after all.
But, given that seabirds inhabit both the open ocean and the shoreline, this eclectic mix of birds faces a litany of threats: overfishing, drowning in fishing lines or nets, plastic pollution, invasive species like rats in nesting areas, oil and gas development and toxic pollution moving up the food chain.
And as if these weren’t enough, the double-whammy of climate change and ocean acidification threatens to flood nesting sites and disrupt food sources.
“Seabirds are particularly good indicators of the health of marine ecosystems,” explained lead author, Michelle Paleczny with the University of British Columbia and the Sea Around Us Project.
“When we see this magnitude of seabird decline, we can see there is something wrong with marine ecosystems. It gives us an idea of the overall impact we’re having.”
Bu with such a large number of species across such a wide variety of environment one is left asking: how did the scientists count so many birds?
The Near Threatened Black-footed Albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) is a species at risk of accidental bycatch in fisheries of the North Pacific.
However, simple mitigation measures have proved to be very effective at keeping seabirds off the hooks.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
Counting Birds
First, the team of researchers scoured all the population data on seabirds available.
They found demographic data on 3,213 populations.
But they couldn’t use all of theses counts, since conservationists had surveyed many of these far-flung populations just once or twice – not enough to show a real trend
The team eventually selected 513 populations that had been counted at least five times.
In all, these populations represented about 19 percent of the world’s seabirds.
Still, Hammil said he believes the team’s findings “are an accurate representation of what is happening worldwide.”
He added, “although we did not include every population, all seabird families were included, and we included populations from every major coastline in the world.”
A gannet grabs a fish by its beak, 2014, in Shetland, Scotland.
Gannets, and other seabirds, depend on abundant fish populations to survive.
Photograph: Richard Shucksmith/BarcroftMedia/Richard Shucksmith/BarcroftMedia
Paleczny also said that when the researchers looked at the differences between monitored and unmonitored populations, they saw “no evidence that the monitored populations are declining more.”
The findings are also bolstered by past research. In 2012 a paper in Bird Conservation International found that 28 percent of seabird species are threatened with extinction with 47 percent in decline.
This meant, in all, seabirds were about twice as likely as land-based birds to be threatened with extinction.
“The trends for many seabird species have clearly been downwards for a number of years, and this paper provides further evidence of this,” Lascelles said.
Still, Paleczny and Hammil’s research arguably paints an even more alarming picture of the state of the world’s seabirds.
For example, according to them, the tern family has fallen by 85%, frigatebirds by 81%, petrels and shearwaters by 79%, and albatrosses by 69%.
Such dismal findings point to one of the study’s patterns: open ocean birds – such as albatrosses, frigatebirds, petrels and shearwaters – are generally faring worse than birds that stick near the coasts.
“[Open-ocean] seabirds are hit especially hard due to their large geographic ranges. Because these species travel so far, there is a greater chance they will encounter threats,” said Hammill who noted that coastal birds “in some cases” are doing better because of improved management of breeding areas and improved fishing gear.
But even when threats were minimized, Lacalles noted that recovery requires diligence and patience.
“Most seabirds are long-lived and slow reproducing, this means even quite small increases in mortality can lead to significant population declines, which they take a long time to recover from.”
And even some widely-dispersed coastal birds are undergoing heavy declines.
For example, the study found that cormorant and shag populations have fallen by 73%.
Laysan Albatross adult and chick on nest dwarfed by pile of marine debris collected on Midway Atoll coast by volunteers.
Plastic poses a major threat to the world’s seabirds and other marine species.
The Laysan Albatross is categorised as Near Threatened by the IUCN Red List.
Photograph: Alamy
Going forward
Given all the threats facing the world’s seabirds, it’s fair to ask: where do we start when it comes to conservation?
“We already have solutions to many of the threats...it’s just they need scaling up and implementing across industries and geographies,” Lascelles said.
“Increased efforts should be made to rid seabird colonies of invasive species, reduce bycatch in fisheries or the ensnaring of birds in fish nets, and setting up conservation areas.”
Paleczny also called for the creation of international marine protected areas to cover the wide ranges of seabirds.
No other bird breeds further south than the Near Threatened Adelie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae). Numbers are increasing in the Ross Sea region and decreasing in the Peninsula region, with the net global population increasing overall.
But other penguin species aren’t faring so well.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
Protected areas in the oceans lag far behind those on land.
Currently, only 2% of the world’s oceans are under some form of protection and less than half of those ban fishing altogether.
In contrast, nearly 15% of the world’s terrestrial landscape is protected.
With so little of the ocean theoretically closed to fisheries – less than 1% – it’s hardly shocking that many seabirds are suffering from overfishing.
Indeed, an illuminating study from 2012 found that whenever fish abundance dropped below one-third of maximum levels, seabird populations began to fall in response.
“What this is saying is that [seabirds] have evolved to exploit average to above-average feeding conditions,” co-author Ian Boyd told Mongabay in 2012.
“This isn’t really very surprising, but some things don’t become obvious until the evidence is right in front of you.”
The accidental bycatch of huge numbers of seabirds in a variety of fisheries (e.g. longline, trawl, gillnets) is one of the main threat facing seabirds and has driven the declines in many species, particularly albatross.
However a number of simple mitigation measures are available, and where they have been implemented the reduction in bycatch has been dramatic.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
At the time, Boyd said their findings should result in a new campaign to save “one third for the birds” (and other marine predators) from the world’s fisheries.
But to Hammill the “most pressing issue” is plastic pollution.
Long neglected by environmentalists – perhaps due to the intractability of the problem – the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans has been slowly getting more notice.
A paper released last month found that 90% of the world’s seabirds likely have plastic in their stomachs.
“I have seen everything from cigarette lighters...to bottle caps to model cars. I’ve found toys [inside seabird guts],” co-author Denise Hardesty, with CSIRO, told the Associated Press.
The razorbill (Alca Torda) is a member of the puffin family restricted to the North Atlantic.
They nest on rocky cliff faces in huge colonies, in some location reduction in sandeel, their main prey item, has caused reduced productivity and declines.
Photograph: Ben Lascelles/Birdlife International
Seabirds continually mistake plastic for fish eggs, devouring large amounts.
Plastic in animals’ stomachs not only release deadly toxins, but can also lead to slow starvation by obstructing the animals’ bowels.
Birds even feed plastic bits to their young, killing their fledglings en masse.
In the end, large-scale actions to help seabirds could also go a long way in cleaning-up our increasingly trashed marine ecosystems.
“The oceans are still woefully under protected and fisheries need greater management and enforcement. All of these activities need investment and support of governments around the world to make them happen,” Lacalles said.
“These actions will build resilience in the seabird populations in the short term, which they need in the face of emerging threats such as climate change.” Links :
The September 2015 equinox happens on September 23 at 8:21 Universal Time,
which translates to 3:21 a.m. Central Daylight Time for us in the
central U.S.
So as you read this, the exact moment of the equinox may
have already happened for you.
It’s often said that – at each equinox –
the sun rises due east and sets due west.
And that’s true.
But why?
How can you conceptualize this?
First you need to know this. An equinox occurs when the sun crosses the celestial equator.
No matter where you are on Earth, the celestial equator intersects
your horizon at due east and due west. See the diagram below to try to
visualize that.
At its highest point in your sky, the celestial equator
appears high or low, depending on your latitude.
The imaginary celestial equator is a great circle dividing the imaginary celestial sphere
into its northern and southern hemispheres, so, from the equator, it’s
directly overhead, for example, wrapping the sky directly above Earth’s
equator.
For purposes of today’s visualization, though, the height of the
celestial equator in your sky doesn’t matter.
What matters are these
two things.
One, the sun is on the celestial equator at the equinox.
Two, the celestial equator intersects your horizon at points due east
and due west. Voila.
The sun rises due east and sets due west on the day of the equinox, as seen from around the globe.
Where does the celestial equator intersect your horizon? The imaginary celestial sphere surrounds Earth. Seen from Earth’s
equator, the celestial equator is overhead. Seen from Earth’s poles,
the celestial poles are overhead. But from northern mid-latitudes, for
example, the north celestial pole appears at a height in your northern
sky that depends on your latitude. Likewise, the path of the celestial
equator across your southern sky depends on your latitude. Meanwhile,
no matter where you are on the globe (unless you are at a pole), the
celestial equator meets your horizon at points due east and due west. Due east and due west are like the “pivot points” from which the
celestial equator appears to shift to various heights in your sky,
depending on your latitude.
Why does the sun rises due east and set due west at the equinoxes? The blue line is the celestial equator (always at your due east and due
west points). The purple line is the ecliptic, or sun’s path. At the
equinox, these two lines intersect. The sun is on the celestial
equator. So the sun rises due east and sets due west, as seen from all
points on the globe (except the poles). Illustration via JCCC Astronomy.
This fact – the sun rising and setting due east and west at every
equinox – makes the day of an equinox a good day for finding due east
and due west from your yard or other favorite site for watching the sky.
Just go outside around sunset or sunrise and notice the location of
the sun on the horizon with respect to familiar landmarks.
If you do
this, you’ll be able to use those landmarks to find those cardinal
directions in the weeks and months ahead, long after Earth has moved on
in its orbit around the sun, carrying the sunrise and sunset points
southward or northward.
The north face of an equatorial sundial receives sunshine in spring and
summer, and the south face receives it in autumn and winter.
On the
equinoxes, sunshine should hit neither side of the sundial, but only the
edge.
Now let’s think about what an equinox really is.
It’s an event that
happens on the imaginary dome of Earth’s sky, but each equinox also
represents a real point on Earth’s orbit.
What happens at every equinox
is very real – as real as the sun’s passage across the sky each day and
as real as the change of the seasons.
Our ancestors couldn’t have understood the equinoxes as we do.
They
didn’t understand them as events that occur in the course of Earth’s
yearly orbit around the sun.
But if they were observant – and some were very observant indeed –
they surely marked today as being midway between the sun’s lowest path
across the sky in winter and highest path across the sky in summer.
And that’s where we are, in orbit, at this equinox.
We’re midway between the two extremes of the sun’s path in your sky.
The seasons result from the Earth's rotational axis tilting 23.5 degrees
out of perpendicular to the ecliptic - or Earth's orbital plane.
An equatorial ring was used in ancient times in an attempt to determine the equinoxes.
The ring plane is set parallel to the plane of the Earth’s equator.
If the equinox happened during the daylight hours, the inside of the ring was expected to be completely in shade at the equinox.
