Seasons

As seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day in this all-sky fisheye composite image the daily trail of the sun are shown in three special days: the winter solstice, the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. At the photographer’s location in Bursa of Turkey the latitude is about 40 degrees north. As described by the photographer “I took the first series of photos on 2007 December 21, only hours before the actual winter solstice. Three months later, it was the vernal equinox. I was ready for the photography, but the sky was not! It was partly cloudy and hazy. If I could not take the equinox photos, I had to wait for 6 months. So I tried my chances anyway with the fast moving clouds in the sky. I managed to take all the photos within less than a couple minutes of the intended times. The images of the sun are a bit irregular because of the less-than-perfect conditions. Three more months later on June 20th, was the final day for the project, on the day of summer solstice. I used a Canon EOS 5D camera and an 8 mm fisheye lens to get the all sky in the frame and I did not use a solar filter. Only 9 pictures of the winter Sun were enough as 13 suns were needed for equinox and 17 for the summer solstice. The composite shows all these pictures of the Sun merged into one with the help of Adobe Photoshop. In the image, north is up, south is bottom, east is to the left and west is to the right. I would love to see similar efforts from different latitudes”.