Sumac and perihelion

Moon a waning crescent, 2% of full.
The temperature is dropping, now at -3, after a wet and foggy New Year's day.

After a long hiatus, time to write again. My horizons have expanded, though, now I live near the ocean for part of the year. May (perhaps), June, July and August will find me trying to understand tides, learning about shorebirds, sea grasses, the specific density of salt water and related matters. During those months I live in Maitland, on the Bay of Fundy and I need to know those things. The rest of the year I'll be in Nepean watching the old fields turn to forest. 

Here's the painting I used on our New Year's Greeting. It's sumac, a forest floor piece, from the Piney Woods Trail.


Tomorrow is the perihelion, the point at which the earth is the closest to the sun during the year. Here's what Wikipedia says about that:

An apsis, plural apsides (pronounced /ˈæpsɨdiːz/), is the point of greatest or least distance of a body from one of the foci of its elliptical orbit. In modern celestial mechanics this focus is also the center of attraction, which is usually the center of mass of the system. Historically, in geocentric systems, apsides were measured from the center of the Earth.
The point of closest approach (the point at which two bodies are the closest) is called the periapsis or pericentre, from Greek περὶ, peri, around. The point of farthest excursion is called the apoapsis (ἀπό, apó, "from", which becomes ἀπ-, ap- or ἀφ-, aph- before an unaspirated or aspirated vowel, respectively), apocentre or apapsis (the latter term, although etymologically more correct, is much less used). A straight line drawn through the periapsis and apoapsis is the line of apsides. This is the major axis of the ellipse, the line through the longest part of the ellipse.
Derivative terms are used to identify the body being orbited. The most common are perigee and apogee, referring to orbits around the Earth (Greek γῆ, gê, "earth"), and perihelion and aphelion, referring to orbits around the Sun (Greek ἥλιος, hēlios, "sun").