Where is Sun?

First of all, may I wish everyone who comes by my blog a heartfelt Happy New Year.
Secondly, I promise I’ll blog more often and more on technical aspects this year than I have for most of 2010.
Thirdly, I’ll admit the title to this blog is nothing to do with the hardware company now owned by Mr Larry Ellison, but is about the huge glowing ball of fire in the sky (which we have not seen a lot of here in England and Wales for the last couple of weeks – not sure about Scotland but I suspect it has been the same). I apologise for the blatantly misleading (and syntactically poor) title.

A quick question for you – It is the depths of winter for most of us, and it has been unusually cold here in the UK and much of Europe. When are we, as a planet, furthest from the Sun during winter? January the 1st? The Shortest day (21st December)? The day the evening start drawing out (December 14th)?
I think many in the Northern Hemisphere will be surprised to learn that we are closest to the sun today (3rd Jan 2011). A mere 147.104 million kilometers from the centre of our solar system. I mentioned this to a few friends and they were all taken aback, thinking we would be furthest from the warmth of the sun at the depths of our winter.

Come the 4th July 2011 it is not only some strange celebration in the US about having made the terrible decision to go it alone in the world {Joke guys!}, but is the day in the year that the Earth is furthest from the sun – 152.097 million kilometers. That is about 3.39% further away and, as the energy we receive from the sun is equal to the square of the distance, does account for a bit of a drop in the energy received. {Surface of a sphere is 4*pi*(R{adius}squared), you can think of the energy from the sun as being spread over the sphere at any given distance}.

Some of you may be wondering why this furthest/closest to the sun does not match the longest/shortest day. As some of you may remember, I explained about the oddities of the shortest day not matching when the nights start drawing out about this time last year. It is because as we spin around our own pole and around the sun, things are complicated by the fact that the earth “leans over” in it’s orbit.

Check out this nice web site where you can state the location and month you want to see sunrise, sunset, day length and (of particular relevance here) the distance from the sun for each day.

I find it interesting that many of the things us most of us see as “common sense” are often not actually right (I always assumed that the shortest day coincided with both the evenings starting to draw out and mornings getting earlier until I stumbled across it when looking at sunset times – I had to go find a nice Astronomer friend to explain it all to me). I also like the fact that a very simple system – a regularly spinning ball circling a large big “fixed point” in a fixed way – throws up some oddities due to little extra considerations that often go overlooked. Isn’t that so like IT?

That lean in the Earth’s angle of spin compared to the plane we revolve around the sun is slowly rotating too, so in a few years (long, long, long after any of us will be around to care) then the furthest point in the orbit will indeed match the northern hemisphere winter. Again like IT, even the oddities keep shifting.