Happy Fall (or Autumnal Equinox)

Happy Fall! Like Mother Nature knows or something, the air turned this week and suddenly, it feels like fall.

I mentioned awhile back how in love I am with the Fox’s preschool. I can’t help myself, there’s something magical about the place.

On Thursday morning, the Fox and I stopped at the grocery store to pick up apple cider. See, his class was having an Autumnal Equinox celebration, and they needed something to drink.

“We celebratin’, Mom.”

“You are? What are you celebrating?”

“De earf. It spins and spins. And then, we get a treat!”

“It spins and spins?”

“Yes! And we get muffins!”

You can’t really argue with that, can you?

Today, he attended the celebration. I was home with MaM, so I didn’t get to see the decorations, but he tells me they were fancy. When I asked him what he did today to celebrate fall, he told me he celebrated the equinox, and he made a bird feeder.

“How did you make a bird feeder?”

“I take de icing and put it on my pinecone. De birds like de icing!”

“Did you roll it in birdseed?”

“Yes. They like birdseeds too.”

So welcome, autumn! The fox and his friends are ready for you. *

 

And for those of you who need a refresher on what, exactly the autumnal equinox is, I defer to Wikipedia:

An equinox occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the Earth‘s axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the center of the Sun being in the same plane as the Earth’s equator. The term equinox can also be used in a broader sense, meaning the date when such a passage happens. The name “equinox” is derived from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night), because around the equinox, the night and day have approximately equal length.

At an equinox, the Sun is at one of two opposite points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator (i.e. declination 0) and ecliptic intersect. These points of intersection are called equinoctial points: classically, the vernal point and the autumnal point. By extension, the term equinoxmay denote an equinoctial point.

An equinox happens each year at two specific moments in time (rather than two whole days), when there is a location (the subsolar point) on the Earth’s equator, where the center of the Sun can be observed to be vertically overhead, occurring around March 20/21 and September 22/23 each year.

Although the word equinox is often understood to mean “equal [day and] night,” this is not strictly true. For most locations on earth, there are two distinct identifiable days per year when the length of day and night are closest to being equal; those days are referred to as the “equiluxes” to distinguish them from the equinoxes. Equinoxes are points in time, but equiluxes are days. By convention, equiluxes are the days where sunrise and sunset are closest to being exactly 12 hours apart.^[2][3]