Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Monday, March 20, 2006
Vernal Equinox, You Say?
Sure doesn't feel like spring. I was going to rake the front yard today, but changed my mind after going out around 10 or 11 AM to fill the birdbath. Cold and windy again. Oh, and it's supposed to snow tomorrow.
Comparing this year's flower pictures to last year's though, I would have to say that everything is blooming earlier. And very probably my memory is faulty, but I don't ever remember the bleeding hearts flowering when the shoots are first emerging. This has been the driest spring in recent memory. We've had no precipitation worthy of the name since February 22.
The winter birds are still around. I've lately been seeing a brown creeper, a red-breasted nuthatch, and a purple finch. The juncos are still here. But on the spring side of things, we've had big flocks of robins recently. And yesterday and again today we were invaded by blackbirds - starlings, grackles, and crows - all three kinds at the same time. They emptied the sunflower seed feeder and tried hard to empty the suet feeder.
To commemorate the equinox, here's a cool animation showing the motion of the Earth about the Sun. But here's something I never realized. As we sit (stand, lie down, whatever) on our big chunk of rock spinning through space, we are never occupying the same place twice. The following is from Earth & Sky:
By the way, someone asked, "Does each solstice and equinox happen at the same place in space every year?"
And the answer is no. As far as we know, Earth never comes back to a place in space where it's been before. Our planet is being carried along by the sun in its journey around the center of the galaxy. The sun moves at about 140 miles per second, but space is so vast that the sun takes some 200 million years to travel once around the galactic center.
And the galaxy is moving, too, through the universe of galaxies, in a way that modern astronomers still don't completely understand. So hang on! We're travelin'. . .
1 Comments:
You have some really nice pics on your blog. Love them...
Post a Comment
<< Tangled Branches: Cultivated, main page