#ecliptic plane

Winter Solstice

At 15:06 GMT, the Sun reaches its southernmost declination along the plane of the ecliptic, marking the winter solstice: a turning point in Earth’s orbital rhythm.

This is not about the 'shortest day', nor the 'longest night' (none of that is true about today), but it is about the motion of the plane of the ecliptic through the celestial sphere.

The Sun’s apparent path through the sky, shaped by the tilt of Earth’s axis, now hovers at its lowest arc in the southern celestial hemisphere. From this moment, it begins its slow ascent northward, tracing a new curve across the heavens.

The solstice is a moment of orbital stillness. A pause in the celestial descent. A whisper from the cosmos that motion continues, even in quiet.

Planets of the Morning Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN)

What Makes Today Special?

What makes today so special? What makes any day special? Is it the blinding blue sky or grey torrents of rain? Maybe the four mourning doves who have found their way to my home, who have sat in my potted herb garden – have shat in it, too – and eaten my thyme. Maybe that’s what makes today special. I’ll go for a walk later, toward end of day when the blue turns pearly and pink through the…

Ecliptic plane /// by Implausible Works /// 2018

Multimedia installation

50 x 50 x 50 cm, wood, glass, laser diode, microcontroller

All the planets of the solar system are essentially on one plane, the so-called ecliptic plane. Our world, spatial dimension, life itself is on this plane. No human being has left this slice of space yet. The laser strip continuously indicates the ecliptic plane’s current position and its relative inclination, updating it every minute.

HU / Ekliptika síkja

The Altiplano Night

Image Credit & Copyright: Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)

Explanation: The Milky Way is massively bright on this cold, clear, altiplano night. At 4,500 meters its reflection in a river, a volcanic peak on the distant horizon, is captured in this stitched panorama under naturally dark skies of the northern Chilean highlands near San Pedro de Atacama. Along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, the band of Zodiacal light also stands out, extending above the Milky Way toward the upper left. In the scene from late April, brilliant Mars, Saturn, and Antares form a bright celestial triangle where ecliptic meets the center of the Milky Way. Left of the triangle, the large purple-red emission nebula Sharpless 2-27, more than twenty Moon diameters wide is centered around star Zeta Ophiuchi.

Solar System Portrait

Image Credit: Voyager Project, NASA

Explanation: On Valentine's Day in 1990, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In it, Voyager's wide angle camera frames sweep through the inner Solar System at the left, linking up with gas giant Neptune, the Solar System's outermost planet, at the far right. Positions for Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are indicated by letters, while the Sun is the bright spot near the center of the circle of frames. The inset frames for each of the planets are from Voyager's narrow field camera. Unseen in the portrait are Mercury, too close to the Sun to be detected, and Mars, unfortunately hidden by sunlight scattered in the camera's optical system. Closer to the Sun than Neptune at the time, small, faint Pluto's position was not covered.