thank you! I can see the sun set on this day immediately to the right of a microwave tower on a far hill, out my back door. I always look forward to it.
It was always confusing to me that solstice is the sun’s ‘farthest south’, (winter) and then continues to move north along the horizon until it reaches ‘farthest north’ (summer). But God has his funny little ways.
Merry Christmas!
It’s interesting that people often think this is the day when the sun sets the earliest and rises the latest.
But that’s not true!
Because of peculiarities of the Earths orbit, the sun actually sets earliest about five days before the solstice. But it keeps rising a bit later each day, and eventually rises latest about five days after.
The combination of the two effects gives us the solstice, the shortest day of the year!
There is also an ancient Jewish sect that celebrates the first time you can see the moon after a new moon. Cause a 100 % dark moon rises and sets with the sun. The moon is between the Earth and sun. When you can first see a lighted section of the moon near the sun setting and rising, is cause for celebration. At least they got to celebrate every month.
It just so happens that the vast majority of humans live north of the equator so for most of us, "winter" is in the December through February months.
Here's an amazing factoid. Barely 10% of the human population lives south of the Equator. Basically we are talking Australia, about half of the Africa continent and most of South America.