My wish for you and yours is a pleasant New Year’s celebration with many good friends and family members, and a cheerful and positive outlook for 2024 and beyond.
The Seasons
Ancient people could predict the seasons from the positioning of the Moon. As the Moon rotates, it also travels around the Earth’s sky. During each month, the different Moon phases appear at positions that shift gradually. We see a changing combination of the bright and dark faces as the Moon orbits Earth — equinoxes and solstices.
If you were in space, you could see this by watching the movement of the Earth’s terminator—the edge between the shadows of nightfall and the sunlight of dusk and dawn. Because the Earth spins on a tilted axis, the orientation of this line changes over the course of a year in sync with the seasons. On the September and March equinoxes, when Earth is at a right angle to the sun, light is spread evenly across the globe, and the terminator runs from pole to pole. But on the December and June solstices, when the Earth is tilted away from and toward the sun, respectively, light is cast disproportionately on each hemisphere, causing the terminator to appear slanted. The equinoxes and solstices happen because the Earth tilts on its axis by 23.5 degrees.
The instant of full moon will fall at 0:33 UTC on December 27, 2023 (6:33 p.m. CST December 26).
Watch this NASA Earth Observatory video to view the migration of Earth’s terminator across the seasons.
From NASA Earth Observatory and EarthSky
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