SUN

The sun is a good thing for a nature photographer.  Just look at the beautiful shots it creates.  It provides both direct and indirect light for my photography.

It not only provides light but heat as well.  All that heat and light only takes about eight minutes to travel 93 million miles.  I was going to put that fact into a bite size chunk, like 125 billion Miller Parks, but seriously how do you make 93 million of anything bite size.

As I was doing research for this blog I learned that the sun is one large nuclear reactor.  The heat and pressure from the sun’s core changes hydrogen (74% of the sun) to helium.  This creates a constant release of energy in a process called nuclear fusion.  I wonder if we’ll ever be able to produce energy as efficiently as the sun does.  But that’s a blog for another day.

Length of days is determined by the earth’s tilt.  That 23 ½ ° is why we have seasons.  So for me in Wisconsin summer is created when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun.  The earth moves the tilt toward the sun from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere.  That’s when we here in the North get fall.  Then winter is when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun and spring comes as the earth shifts the tilt again.  Fascinating.  I wouldn’t have thought of that.

So the sun is a good thing for everyone.  It provides light and heat and seasons and beauty.  Very Cool.

Pack out what you pack in.

  

Sources:

            A Project Guide to Wind, Weather, and the Atmosphere by Marylou Marano Kjelle, Mitchell Lane Publishers, Hockessin, Delaware ©2011.  www.mitchelllane.com

            Solar Energy by David and Patricia Armentrout, Rourke Publishing, Vero Beach, FL © 2009.  www.rourkepublishing.com

            13 Planets:  The Latest View of the Solar System, by David A. Aguilar, National Geographic Society, Washington DC, © 2011.