Kathy and I are vacationing on Maui. It is toward the end of June.
Yesterday, we walked out of
a store and Kathy asked me which way was West.
I have always had a great sense of direction and immediately pointed
generally in the direction toward the water.
This was correct… but later in the day, I noticed that if I had used
shadows to determine directions, I would have been 180 degrees wrong
What tipped me off was that our hotel room faces directly
south. I noticed around 5 pm that there
was only a very small amount of sunlight (only a couple inches) on our
balcony. In Spokane, a south facing
balcony without a roof would have been in full sunshine. How could this possibly be what I was
seeing?
The answer is that it is only a couple days past the summer
solstice (June 20th)… and, Hawaii lies south of the Tropic of Cancer
(the meridian that indicates the sun’s most northern travel during a year. After the summer solstice, the sun begins to
head south toward the equator and then the Tropic of Capricorn. Because the sun is north of Hawaii right now,
all of the shadows are reversed from what I would have expected in Spokane (or
any other part of the U.S. for that matter).
Lesson learned? Pay
attention to the shadows you see… but be aware of your latitude. Is it possible that the sun appears in the
north when you generally expect it to be in the south?
