Unbalanced on the Equinox

It didn't work.  The first time I tried, I broke the egg.
Guess I was...MYTH-TAKEN.

Equinox:  

from the Latin "nox" meaning "night" and "Equus" meaning "horsey."

Wait, scratch that.  Let's begin again.

Equinox: 

from the Latin, meaning, "overpriced gym membership."

No good?

Ok, ok, ok.

Equinox, Autumnal: 

End of summer, beginning of autumn, delicious transition to bold, bright colors and cool weather, beginning of the bittersweet parting with all of it for the long, cold winter.

Oh yeah, and from the Latin "aequinoctium", from

Aequus, -a, -um: Equal
Nox, Noctis, f. : Night

My high school Latin teacher would be so proud!  (For a hot minute, and then he'd call me "dollface" - because he occasionally talked like a '30's gangster - and remind me of how I screwed up on the Latin Regents exam sophomore year by missing a question about Roman culture.  He was suuuuuuuuuuper pissed about that.  I still have no idea what the question was.  Did I confuse my atria and cubicula?  My lares and penates?  I'll never know, but mea culpa, Pater.  If it's any consolation, nowadays, thanks to you, I routinely lay waste to Jeopardy categories that involve all things Roman.  Y'know, from my couch.  While eating cereal for dinner.  Stop judging me.)

There's all sorts of myth and superstition and misunderstanding about the Equinox, so let's get down to brass tacks and sort this out. (Brass tacks?  Who talks like that?)  First of all, astronomically speaking, the equinox marks one of two days a year when the sun makes a perfect 90 degree angle with the Equator.  The Earth is tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees off the perpendicular all throughout the year, and depending on its point in the revolution and the season, that tilt is either toward or away from the Sun.  But not on the equinox!  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight now, as I type this, neither hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, and neither hemisphere is tilted away.  The sunrise is perfectly due East and sunset perfectly due West.  Twice a year, half a year apart - symmetry, balance.  Here's a really bad-ass video I found on YouTube to better illustrate this.

So naturally we get lots of superstitions and myths about being able to balance eggs, broomsticks, and other wobbly items on these significant days.

Now the egg thing is a total myth. You can balance an egg any old day in the year.  Or if you're like me, and can't do it any old day of the year.  (Know what else I can't do?  Rubik's cube.  Hence the picture above.  And below!)

Tiny fat Rosie wants to claw her own face off because she was given this THING.

This theme of balance comes not only from the yearly cycles and symmetry, but from the daily ones as well.  Theoretically, there are equal amounts of daylight and darkness on the equinox, hence the fancy Latin name.  But because of the fuzzy light we see in those crepuscular moments, this isn't technically true.  Sunrise and sunset aren't turned on and off like a switch, so you see the light creeping in before and lingering slightly after the sun is actually visible (but don't look directly at it!). You get the idea, though.  It's the closest thing that we have to a perfect daily symmetry, happening twice a year.

Know what else happens twice a year?  Manhattanhenge!

Astronomy lends itself so nicely to poetic musings.  Remember that scene in the movie Contact when Dr. Arroway is transported through time and space and she's trying to record her observations for the team back on Earth?  She's blown away by how beautiful the experience is, and can't find the words to describe what she's seeing, so she just says "They should have sent a poet." THIS.

I love this: a science that could so easily be reduced to angles, chemicals, and mathematical equations has been the source of cultural origin myths and various pantheons for as long as written or oral tradition has been recorded around the planet.  And it wasn't just the Romans.  Mayans, Egyptians, and Druids (oh my!) have just as much myth as math when it comes to these special points in the year.  Architecture plays off of these yearly cycles, so the space in which we live becomes linked to the larger movements of bodies in outer space.  We use these cyclical movements, the interaction between spaces outer and personal,  to mark the passage of time.  Time, space, place and culture are all tangled up in this gorgeous cultural matrix.  Man, I love this stuff.

It's tough to take off my science teacher hat.  This was one of my favorite parts of the curriculum.  And I so rarely get to wear it in conjunction with my anthropologist hat.  How about I hold one hat in each hand to help with balance.

The equinox is also a nice time to think about Earth as being part of a much bigger picture, not just containing its own systems and cycles, but an important part of a larger process and structure.  I was poking around on Wired.com the other day, and came across this:

Royal Observatory Picks Best Astronomy Photos of the Year

To piggy-back on this post's theme of balance-or-lack-thereof, some of these pics knocked me right off of mine.  Check out the link and you won't be disappointed.  It's goes nicely with how Dr. Arroway feels in Contact, and for me, these photos are evidence that we cannot ever give up on the Space Program.  The pictures are also a testament to how beautiful and strange Earth and space really are.  Especially this one, by Masahiro Miyasaka, taken in Nagano, Japan.

Source

RIGHT?!!?!?!

I'll be waiting here while regain your balance.

Let's end this post on suuuuuuuuuuuuper-twee note.

Haha!  See what I did there?  Happy Equinox.