Shadows

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 20^th)… 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?