{"id":24637,"date":"2021-12-21T05:56:10","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T05:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24637"},"modified":"2021-12-21T05:56:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-21T05:56:10","slug":"solstice-sun-and-milky-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24637","title":{"rendered":"Solstice Sun and Milky Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img src='https:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/image\/2112\/WinterSolsticeMW_Seip_1079.jpg' style='max-width:600px;' \/><\/p>\n<div>Welcome to December&#8217;s solstice, first day of winter in the north and summer for the southern hemisphere. Astronomical markers of the seasons, solstice and equinox dates are based on the Sun&#8217;s place in its annual journey along the ecliptic, through planet Earth&#8217;s sky. At this solstice, the Sun reaches its maximum southern declination of -23.5 degrees today at 15:59 UTC, while its right ascension coordinate on the celestial sphere is 18 hours. That puts the Sun in the constellation Sagittarius in a direction near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. In fact, if you could see today&#8217;s Solstice Sun against faint background stars and nebulae (that&#8217;s really hard to do, especially in the daytime &#8230;) your view might look something like this composited panorama. To make it, images of our fair galaxy were taken under dark Namibian night skies, then stitched together in a panoramic view. From a snapshot made on 2015 December 21, the Sun was digitally overlayed as a brilliant star at today&#8217;s northern winter solstice position, close to the center of the Milky Way. via NASA <a href=\"https:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/apod\/ap211221.html\"><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to December&#8217;s solstice, first day of winter in the north and summer for the southern hemisphere. Astronomical markers of the seasons, solstice and equinox dates are based on the <a href=\"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24637\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[10,12],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-24637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-whatsup","tag-ifttt","tag-nasa"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24638,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24637\/revisions\/24638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}