Magazine Posts

JŽ 06-018 steam locomotive gear, museum steam locomotive, Central station Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

magnezis magnestic on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Yesterday the Sun reached its southernmost point in planet Earth's sky. Called a solstice, many cultures mark yesterday's date as a change of seasons -- from autumn to winter in Earth's Northern Hemisphere and from spring to summer in Earth's Southern Hemisphere. The featured image was taken just before the longest night of the 2025 northern year at Stonehenge in United Kingdom. There, through stones precisely placed 4,500 years ago, a 4.5 billion year old large glowing orb is seen setting. Even given the precession of the Earth's rotational axis over the millennia, the Sun continues to set over Stonehenge in an astronomically significant way.

Photo by English Heritage, Josh Dury

Snow on Ayase river by Shōtei Takahashi. 1915 woodcut print from the Rijksmuseum collection.

Shōtei Takahashi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

View of coastline northwest from above Manarola: fields and steep trail to Volastra in foreground, Corniglia Station and town centre, north to Punta Mesco. Depicts the north half of Cinque Terre National Park coastline. Liguria, Italy.

This Photo was taken by Timothy A. Gonsalves. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author. I would much appreciate if you send me an email tagooty@gmail.com or write on my talk page, for my information. Please contact me before commercial use. Please do not upload an edited image here without consulting me. I would like to make corrections only at my own source to ensure that the changes improve the image and are preserved.Otherwise you may upload an edited image with a new name. Please use one of the templates derivative or extract., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Mike L on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The word solstice is from the Latin for Sun and to pause or stand still. And in the days surrounding a solstice the Sun's annual north-south drift in planet Earth's sky does slow down, pause, and then reverse direction. So near the solstice the daily path of the Sun through the sky really doesn't change much. In fact, near the December solstice, the Sun's consistent, low arc through northern hemisphere skies, along with low surface temperatures, has left a noticeable imprint on this path to the mountain town of Peaio in northern Italy. The morning frost on the road has melted away only where the sunlight was able to reach the ground. But it remains in the areas persistently shadowed by the fence, tattooing in frost an image of the fence on the asphalt surface.

Photo by Marcella Pace

Snowy landscape around the Schmidbachtal in Beilstein, Germany, with a distinctive old pear tree.

Roman Eisele, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.