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i should have remembered this from our trip to peru a couple years ago. i normally have an instant sense of direction, even in new places. but after looking at a city map of where we are, i’m realizing that i’m a little turned around. so then it dawns (ha!) on me – the sun rises in the east and heads north as it travels west. it was the same in peru in the southern hemisphere. astute geographers will note that i am not in the southern hemisphere – kampala is about 30km north of the equator. but astute astronomers will inform those geographers about the orbit of the earth around the sun and what goes on with that 23 degree tilt of the axis.

i am neither an astute geographer nor astronomer so you can correct my reasoning here. we got here a week after the solstice, leaving minneapolis and its 45 degree north latitude. subtracting the 23 degrees that the northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun during the day, minneapolis was somewhere between 22 and 23 degrees north of the virtual equator. my own made-up name. on the solstice, the sun is directly over the tropic of cancer at noon. anyway, when we arrived here at the equator, with the southern hemisphere’s 23 degree tilt away from the sun, we were somewhere between 22 and 23 degrees south of the virtual equator. more simply put, because minneapolis and kampala are the same distance from the tropic of cancer, on the summer solstice the sun ascends to the same height in the sky. except the sun is to the south in minneapolis and to the north in kampala.

it was also interesting traveling on the solstice because we went from the longest day of the year at 16 hours to one of the shortest day here. granted, at the equator it doesn’t change much from june to december, but the change from minneapolis was pretty dramatic. 101phil 101africa