Image: Picture: Handout / Just Stop Oil / AFP

NOT sure if you had your Druid clobber out last Friday to mark the winter solstice. Maybe you opted for some Wiccan robes.

Either way, you wanted to be rugged up, the shortest day of the year’s nine hours and 33 minutes aren’t getting any warmer.

Not quite so cool in old Blighty, where outraged antipodeans in Just Stop Oil T-shirts just before their longest day of the year blasted Stonehenge and its axial solstice alignment with orange paint.

Fruit loops on the job. About as sharp as Taliban troglodytes vandalising World Heritage Buddha monuments in Afghanistan.

About as thick, too, as the numbnuts who hacked up Glastonbury’s Holy Thorn. Christians and Pagans alike deplored those efforts.

No sense of history or culture, just bloody-minded ideology when things as universal as the solstices provide an opportunity for a meeting of the minds. An appreciation of different ideas and perspectives.

Curious time of year, the solstices. A full moon and expectations of a visit any minute from T Coronae Borealis, a bright nova that fronts up only once every 80 years, add to the curiosity.

I like the summer solstice for its proximity to ancient Yule festivities and our Christmas. That’s my birthday. As a kid, sympathetic relloes showered me with winter solstice presents in June.

Solstices have been observed for millennia because they’re turning points on the calendar for agricultural and food-stock concerns. The Christmas connection was manufactured for political reasons.

More interesting is the fact the solstices are all about the Earth’s wobbling axis as it spins in space. The winter solstice occurs when the South Pole is at maximum tilt from the Sun; the summer solstice when it’s nearest. About 23.4 degrees each time.

Funny thing about this wobble is that every 26,000 years the entire thing itself completes another wobble.

It’s a thing called the precession of the equinoxes and looks like a spinning top as its vertical axis swings from left to right in a circular fashion. It’s a fair jump, too, some 47 degrees from one side to the other.

As you might expect, this precession can offer some pretty full-on effects on Earth. Think what the Moon does to tides and it’s little surprise the precession might turn northern Africa from green temperate zone into scorching Sahara.

Or change the astronomical map overhead. Polaris isn’t a permanent north star. You might also want to check the status of your astrological sign. It’s not in whatever position, relative to Earth, it was 10,000 years ago.

Stephen Barker, of Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences – together with a team reported in Science in 2022 -­ contend that glacial termination has depended mostly on precession for the past million years.

That’s something.

Might give the Just Stop Oil folks something to mull over before their next lame-brained hijinks.

Might take another 26,000 years, sadly, before you’ll get anything sensible from the Taliban.

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 25 June 2024