A Date with the Equinox

Geographer at heart

 I’ve been meaning to write about the equinox for some years now. The weather: maximum and minimum temperatures, rainfall, dates of the monsoon, eclipses and so on were of great interest to my father. All of us, his children, inherited his love of natural phenomena, and of observation. The little box in the bottom corner of The Statesman - Babuji's favourite paper - gave us all the relevant weather data for the day, including the times of sunrise and sunset.

Southbound

Navaratri/Durga Puja 

With climate change, we don’t seem to have much of temperate weather. Seasons change overnight. One misses all the ‘tween seasons; especially ‘September-October weather’ - ‘full sleeves weather’ as 'my old friend and confidante Mademoiselle Kitty' reminded me. It’s the stuff of dreams and memories now.

In Delhi, the excitement would build slowly. The wind changed direction. Fluffy clouds filled the skies as the monsoon withdrew. There was the scent of harshringar/coral jasmine late at night, or the smell of leaves burning in the park as I walked home from the bus stop after school play rehearsals, late in the afternoon.

The first time we stayed back after school was for an extra Geography class with Miss Sophie Baretto, who said we were lagging behind and must get through 'Rotation and Revolution' quickly.

The school buildings were deserted except for us girls of Six B, sitting in our newly constructed second floor classroom, with its new green blackboard on which chalk pieces squeaked and broke in two. Miss Baretto drew a diagram with four earths in different positions around the sun on four days: March 21, June 21, September 23 and December 22. One single line from the sun in the centre touched the lines representing the equator or the tropics on each earth.

That afternoon we learnt about the earth’s tilted axis and how that gave us summer and winter, the longest day and longest night, as well as the marvel of the Equinox, when day and night were equal all over the world.

Pic by Viji - with whom I visited the dear old school in May - 43 degrees C that day!!

Some years ago my brother Raja – upon whom was inflicted the indignity of collecting me after Miss Baretto’s extra class – Raja and I started noting down sunset and sunrise timings of the days leading up to the autumnal equinox. We thought that it might not occur on September 23rd at all, since our October evenings were much darker than December evenings. 

The equinox, or 12/12, occurred about a week off the date in Delhi. That same day, in Dibrugarh, Assam, I was two minutes short! That is, my ‘day’ was 12 hours and two minutes long. Imagine our surprise when the next day gave us a reading of 12 hours and one minute, and the one after was 11 hours and 59 minutes. Had we bypassed the equinox?

You gave me the answer 

On September 23rd, the sun rose at 4:59 and set at 5:05. The weather app on my phone says day and night will be equal tomorrow, that is on September 28th. But just yesterday, I read that this is called the 'Equilux'. Most appropriate, since it enlightened me! Raja found an article that explains it all clearly: https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/equilux.html

'Daylight is good at arriving at the right time', wrote George Harrison, and it will continue to do so for some time. Season's greetings to all of you!

Gowri

September 2022

Here's one WhatsApp image I actually liked - from last year, as you can see!