Monday, June 21: Summer Solstice Silliness

Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2004 6:58 am

If you’re like most people, you have probably noticed that summer days last longer than winter days, especially when the summer days stretch long into the evening, and when the winter skies darken before you get home from work or school. If you’re like most people, you probably pay less attention to the position of the sun over the course of the year.

If you lived on the equator and were to track the position of the sun over the course of the year when it reached its zenith (highest point), you would see a pattern that looked like this (called analemma):

Position of sun on June 20, 2004

Interesting Fact to Make You Smarter (and potentially save your life if you ever get stranded on a desert island): Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway was clever enough to create his own analemma and thus create a primitive calendar. (This IS a trick you can try at home. Unlike being stranded on a desert island… which is harder, more expensive and considerably more dangerous.)

If you lived in Columbus, Ohio, you would see a pattern like this:

Position of sun on June 20, 2004

If you lived at Toolik Lake all year, analemma would look like this only without the trees… trees’ roots can reach through the permafrost):

Position of sun on June 20, 2004

And, if you lived at the North Pole, it would look like this (only without the land! North Pole is over the frozen Arctic Ocean):

Position of sun on June 20, 2004

Yesterday a very special thing happened all over the planet. The sun reached its highest yearly position in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere; it was summer solstice (from Latin, sol – sun (solar); stice – standing). It was the longest day of the year for people in the Northern Hemisphere, and the shortest day of the year for people in the Southern Hemisphere.

Folks at Toolik Lake celebrate this annual occurrence with a very silly costume party. Being nine hours from the nearest costume shop, we are forced to be creative and resourceful; it is highly inconvenient to run to the store for that last-minute perfect addition to our outfits. So we used garbage bags, cardboard boxes, construction debris, and lots of duct tape.

The theme was “Getting Medieval”: we had a trebuchet, an archery range (with homemade bows), knights, fair maidens, a witch (the poor thing had buboes, a symptom of the bubonic plague), and a couple of dragons. The whole affair was graced with rainbows and plenty of mosquitoes (we were becoming part of the Arctic as the ‘skeets carried away our blood).

The knight who said “Ni”, commanding his listeners to chop down the tallest tree in the forest with … a herring. Hear him, if you dare: www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/ni.wav

Yo gets an archery lesson from Robin Hood.

Beth demonstrates her jousting prowess (notice her steed).

Lori is a very fierce dragon.

Brendan has committed an unspeakable crime (unspeakable because no one knows what it was) and has been put in the stockade.

Fair maidens can tame dragons (though frankly, I was more concerned about the mosquitoes!)

Scott was a marauding Viking (and the architect of the trebuchet).

Toolik hosts some very resourceful fair maidens

(Imagine: some people spend hundreds of dollars on formal gowns when all they really need are some garbage bags, duct tape and a bit of ingenuity)