I Felt the Earth Move...

Read about this photo here

We know, intellectually, that the earth moves in relation to the sun, both daily and seasonally.  That's why we have day and night and summer and winter, right?  But knowing and seeing are two different things.  Be sure to click the link under the photo and read about how this image was compiled and what it means.

And this is so cool:

This is an Analemma

There's an entire website devoted to analemmae (is that the plural?)  Here's their explanation:

Have you ever seen this figure-8 on a globe and wondered what it is? It is simply this: if you could record the position of the sun in the sky at the same time every day, let’s say sometime around noon and subtracting one hour if you are observing daylight saving time, you would notice that the sun takes a rather strange path. You might notice that at certain times throughout the year the sun's position not only varies higher and lower (North and South) as you would expect with the change of the seasons, but also slightly east and west. This figure-8 path that the sun makes in the sky is called the analemma. ... Why does the sun take this strange path? There are two reasons and they are completely independent from each other.

1. The Earth is tilted on its axis 23.5° in relation to the plane of its orbit around the sun.

2. The Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse.
It is simply the sum of these two effects that causes the analemma.

So if our tomatoes don't do well, can we blame it on an analemma?