Speeding Through Wintertesttest Thursday brings two celestial
milestones: it marks the latest sunrise of the year and it marks
perihelion, earth’s closest point to the sun. Intuitively, you
might expect the closer to the sun we are the warmer the
weather. However, the three million miles difference between
perihelion and aphelion — our farthest point from the sun in
July — is not near enough to account for the changing seasons.
Instead, earth’s 231⁄2-degree tilted axis brings about our
seasons, as one hemisphere faces the sun for more hours than
not. While our proximity to the sun isn’t responsible for the
seasons, it certainly does influence them. The earth orbits the
sun not in a circle but in an egg-shaped ellipse. With
perihelion, we’re at the pointed tip of that egg. Being closer
to the sun, its gravitational pull on us is all the stronger,
propelling us around the bend roughly five percent faster than
when we’re at the wider, more shallow end of our orbit. As a
result, the time it takes earth to travel