Chichén Itzá (Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico): El Castillo, the famous pyramid at Chichén Itzá, puts on a striking show on the equinoxes.At Hagar Qim and Mnajdra temples, the semicircular chambers are aligned so that the rising sun on an equinox is framed between the stones. Megalithic Temples of Malta: These seven temples on the Mediterranean island are some of the earliest free-standing stone buildings in the world, going back 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.Welcome to fall equinox!Ĭheck out England's most beautiful places 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. There are only two times each year that the Earth's axis is neither tilted toward or away from the sun. This image of Earth was taken on September 22, 2015. 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. These are perhaps the seasons that more people are familiar with,” Chinchar says. “Meteorological fall is different … in that the dates never change and are based on climatological seasons rather than Earth’s angle relative to the sun. Precisely when will the fall equinox happen?Ħ scenic drives across the United States where you can get your fall foliage fix Here are the answers to some fall equinox questions:įrom the 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 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 might have thought. They have long, dark winters and then have a summer solstice where night barely intrudes.īut during the equinox, everyone from pole to pole gets to enjoy a 12/12 split of day and night. But hardy folks close to the poles, in places such as Alaska and the northern parts of Canada and Scandinavia, go through wild swings in the day/night ratio each year. People close to the equator have roughly 12-hour days and 12-hour nights all year long. The bulk of the world’s population will experience the 2023 fall equinox on Saturday. Technically, your location on the globe also determines whether you mark the fall equinox this year on Saturday, September 23, or Friday, September 22. For people south of the equator, this equinox actually heralds the coming of spring. If you reside in the Northern Hemisphere, you know it as the fall equinox (or autumnal equinox). On Saturday, we enter our second and final equinox of 2023. Everyone on Earth is seemingly on equal status – at least when it comes to the amount of light and dark that they get. Twice a year, the sun doesn’t play favorites.
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