![]() ![]() ![]() Those two brief moments don't always happen at the same time and day every year, though. WATCH BELOW: This animation shows Earth's tilt throughout the year, which gives rise to our changing seasons. The bottom right panel shows the angle at the point where the stick figure is standing, at roughly 44 degrees North latitude. ![]() The panels on the right show how this affects the angle of the sunlight falling on Earth. Each hemisphere ends up pointed most towards the Sun during its summer solstice and pointed furthest away from the Sun at its winter solstice. It's this change in angle that is ultimately responsible for the changing of the seasons.Īs the video below shows, as Earth travels around the Sun, the angle of the planet's axis stays the same. Perhaps the most directly noticeable effect, which can be tracked on a day-to-day basis, is how high the Sun reaches in our sky throughout the year. While we don't feel the tilt itself, we see its effects. It's this consistent tilt, along with our world's motion around the Sun, that are the reasons for our seasons. Earth's tilt remains the same all year long, with the planet's axis always pointing out of the North Pole towards a star named Polaris. The planet does not 'wobble' back and forth by 23.4 degrees during the year, though. As the Earth traces its elliptical path around the Sun every year, the axis it rotates around each day is tilted with respect to that path, by roughly 23.4 degrees. When you look at it from afar, though, our entire world is slightly off-kilter. Standing here on Earth's surface, nothing may seem particularly out of the ordinary. September 22nd is the Autumnal Equinox for 2021, the fall season's start for the northern hemisphere. ![]()
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