{"id":6,"date":"2018-06-18T15:45:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-18T06:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/?p=6"},"modified":"2018-06-18T15:45:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-18T06:15:31","slug":"science-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/2018\/06\/18\/science-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Science at home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">Feeling like you\u2019re headed for the dark side lately? That could be because 21 June is the Winter Solstice! <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">The Winter Solstice is the day of the year with the fewest daylight hours (and therefore the longest night).\u00a0 It usually falls between 20 and 23 June in the southern hemisphere.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">Each year Earth completes an orbit around the sun. The Earth\u2019s axis is tilted about 23 degrees, so there are times each year when each hemisphere is tilted closer to or further from the sun. \u00a0This is why we have seasons, and it\u2019s also why the sun always appears in the northern half of the sky for us. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">Our\u00a0Winter Solstice is when the southern hemisphere is furthest from the sun. It\u2019s also when the sun appears to us to be travelling its lowest across the sky. At noon, you might want to take a look at shadows being cast by the sun.\u00a0 They\u2019re pretty long compared to shadows we see in midsummer!\u00a0 It looks almost like it\u2019s late afternoon.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">During the Winter Solstice, if you were standing on the Antarctic Circle (latitude 66.56 degrees south), you would see the sun sitting just on the horizon during midday \u2013 but anywhere further south, and you wouldn\u2019t see the sun peak above the horizon at all. This is referred to as polar night \u2013 no need for your sunnies!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">Sailors have been using the sun to navigate for thousands of years.\u00a0 If you know the date, and you observe the highest point in the sky the Sun gets to, you can figure out how far north or south you are from the equator.\u00a0 Matthew Flinders, the explorer our university is named after, used this method to circumnavigate Australia.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif\"><span style=\"color: #000000\">After the solstice, the southern hemisphere will start to tilt closer to the sun, and our days will start becoming longer and our nights shorter. But the sun won\u2019t start rising earlier just yet. The extra day length will be added to the afternoon, not the morning, so the sun will set later than at the solstice. \u00a0You can still sleep in for another few weeks!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Feeling like you\u2019re headed for the dark side lately? That could be because 21 June is the Winter Solstice! The Winter Solstice is the day of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1249,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,19],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-science-club","tag-stem"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/stem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}