The Correct Countdown to the 21 December 2012 Solstice - Exact Time of the 21 December 2012 Solstice Precisely Accurate to the Second

The Astronomically Correct Countdown Timer for the 21 December 2012 Solstice

Accurate to the second

As far as I know this is the only astronomically accurate 2012 solstice countdown timer on the web that is correct (and to the nearest second).

Since I couldn't find it anywhere else on the web, I've used online NASA computers to calculate the exact time of the 21 December 2012 solstice, accurate to the second. I only thought of doing this on the morning of Friday 21 December 2012, since I just assumed that it would have already been done to death. But to my great surprise, I couldn't even find a site with the accurate time of the solstice, let alone a countdown timer that was correct. Now I wish I had done it several weeks (or months) ago, as I would have got millions of hits, lol. 13 hours left won't be time for google (or anyone much) to even find this page.

Note that the clock on december212012.com is wrong by an hour and 37.627 seconds (unless they have fixed it — I'm writing this when there is 12 hours left on it and there should be 13). As you can easily verify by a Google search for "time in GMT". My clock is wrong by about 1/3 of a second, because I couldn't find a flash countdown timer that allowed me to enter the end time in fractions of a second (and I don't have the time to program one in the remaining 13 hours before the solstice, when there are important things like Christmas shopping to do today).

All the websites I could find give the time as either 11:11 or 11:12 UTC (or GMT which is basically the same thing), i.e. Greenwich Mean Time, otherwise known as Coordinated Universal Time.

Which suggested strongly that the exact time of the solstice is between 11:11 and 11:12. But that was all I could find, apart from some countdown style calculators, which did not impress me as being created with a huge amount of detailed astronomical background knowledge (and, after having done the calculations, turned out to be wrong).

So to find the answer it was necessary to use the NASA website and do some calculations.

Using the NASA computer-generated information, the exact time of the solstice is 11:11:37.627 UTC, i.e. 11:11 and 37.627 seconds. Which is between 11:11 and 11:12 as expected.

In Sydney time (AEDST - Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time), which is GMT+11 hours, this is 22:11 and 37.627 seconds, or in 12 hour time, 10:11 and 37.627 seconds PM.

What Is the Solstice?

The solstices are the moments when the position of the sun in the sky is at its northerly and southerly extremes. There are two every year, one in winter and one in summer. The December solstice is summer in the Southern hemisphere and winter in the Northern hemisphere, and it is the moment in time when the sun is at its most southerly position in the sky. This is an exact moment in time (just like how noon, when the sun is directly overhead, is an exact moment in time). Once the December solstice has passed, the days get shorter (in the Southern hemisphere) and longer (in the Northern hemisphere). There are also two equinoxes, one in spring and one in autumn, when the sun is exactly in line with the Earth's equator and the day is the same length as the night.

Do an internet search for "solstice" if you would like to find out more information about this.

Advanced Background Information

The "ecliptic" is the line representing the Earth's orbit around the sun projected onto the sky. This is the same as saying that it is the line projected onto the sky where the sun is always found. The sun travels one full circle around the ecliptic once a year. The "ecliptic longitude" (used in the explanation below) is a coordinate system, just like the latitude and longitude on Earth, but using the ecliptic line as the reference point rather than the Earth's equator. The zero point of ecliptic longitude is defined to be what is called the First Point of Aries, which is where the sun crosses the celestial equator (that's the Earth's equator projected onto the sky) in March. This is one of the equinoxes (the other is in September when it again crosses the celestial equator on the other side of the Earth's yearly orbit). The units are degrees, so that there are 360 degrees in the full circle, and the ecliptic coordinates of 0 degrees corresponds to the March equinox, 90 degrees is the June solstice, 180 degrees is the September equinox, and 270 degrees is the December solstice.

If you are interested in these types of things, you can use a plantarium software program like the excellent "Stellarium" to display the ecliptic and see the path of the sun and experiment with how it all works.

Details of the Calculation

For people who are interested, this is how the calculation was done.

I used the web based interface to the NASA computer system called HORIZONS, "which can be used to generate ephemerides for solar-system bodies". This looks official enough.

The page is located at ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

Using these settings:

     Ephemeris Type : OBSERVER
        Target Body : Sun [Sol] [10]
  Observer Location : Geocentric [500]
          Time Span : Start=2012-12-21 11:00, Stop=2012-12-21 11:30, Step=1 m
     Table Settings : QUANTITIES=31
     Display/Output : default (formatted HTML)

The web page outputs a table of values that looks like this (The only values needed are the two on either side of 270.0000 degrees, I've included a few on either side of these).

   Date__(UT)__HR:MN        ObsEcLon    ObsEcLat
   *********************************************
   2012-Dec-21 11:07     269.9967278   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:08     269.9974350   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:09     269.9981422   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:10     269.9988493   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:11     269.9995565   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:12     270.0002637   0.0001750
   2012-Dec-21 11:13     270.0009708   0.0001749
   2012-Dec-21 11:14     270.0016780   0.0001749
   2012-Dec-21 11:15     270.0023852   0.0001749
   2012-Dec-21 11:16     270.0030923   0.0001749

The actual moment of the solstice is when the sun is located at exactly 270.000000 degrees of ecliptic longitude.

You can see that this occurs between 11:11 and 11:12 as expected. Using the two values of ecliptic longitude for 11:11 and 11:12 and some high school maths, the exact time when the sun is at 270.00000 degrees can be calculated.

270.0002637 - 269.9995565 = 0.0007072 degrees, which is how many degrees the sun moves in the one minute between 11:11 and 11:12.

and 270.000000 - 269.9995565 = 0.0004435 degrees, which is how many degrees the sun moves between 11:11 and the precise moment of the solstice.

The second result above as a fraction of the first (i.e. 0.0004435 / 0.0007072 = 0.627121041) gives the fraction of the minute (between 11:11 and 11:12) when the exact solstice occurs. Multiplying this by 60 gives the value in seconds, as 37.62726 seconds.

See Also

Why the Global Economy is About to Crash
What To Do About the Upcoming Economic Crash
Arithmetic, Population and Energy Video
What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire (Video)
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The Correct Countdown to the 21 December 2012 Solstice - Exact Time of the 21 December 2012 Solstice Precisely Accurate to the Second

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