Blame it on the Moon

According to an article on the BBC website:

Extra police officers are to patrol the streets of Brighton on nights when there is a full moon.

This is going to happen after

Insp Andy Parr ... compared crime statistics for Brighton and Hove with lunar graphs to discover the trend.

and, apparently, he thinks he's found one.

It'd be interesting to see what he actually found, especially given that there seems to be a lack of evidence of any real correlation.

From my point of view it's tempting to imagine that more people will hit the streets when the Moon is full thanks to the extra light. And, of course, more people, especially if it's more people with a few drinks inside them, could cause an increase in incidents. But, if that's the case, wouldn't it make more sense to increase policing during many of the weeks around the summer solstice when, in most of the UK anyway, it never really gets that dark anyway?

I do like this bit though (emphasis is mine):

It follows research by the Sussex force which concluded there was a rise in violent incidents when the moon was full - and also on paydays.

I'm the Gnomon

I spent last weekend in Lancaster. While I was there I took a walk into Williamson Park so I could go and take some photographs of a pretty neat sundial they've got there.

When someone mentions "sundial" most people probably think of the more "traditional" kind of sundial that has a fixed gnomon. The Lancaster Sundial is a little different in that it's an analemmatic sundial and you play the part of the gnomon.

In the middle of the dial is an analemma. To tell the time, and to take the equation of time into account, you pick a spot to stand on depending on the date and then use your shadow to figure out the time (adding an hour if needed depending on daylight saving time).

You can see more images of the sundial in my album of photographs of Lancaster.

Fun Flickr Sunsets

I recently started having a play around with Flickr (and I'm mostly impressed by it; it is a little easier than maintaining my own photo gallery) so when I saw this story on Astronomy Blog this morning it really caught my attention.

How cool is that?

I just love it when the "obvious" is found in "not so obvious" places.

Ignoring the Sun

Ever since I wrote about the UK floodlighting petition back in November I've been keeping an eye on the e-petitions site (its RSS feed makes this nice and easy). Some petitions are obvious, some are amusing, some are kooky and some are just outright strange.

I saw one this morning that probably falls under amusing, or perhaps just misinformed:

Why bother changing the clocks? Greenwich Mean Time is valid all year round. Midday indicates that the sun is highest in the sky; changing to BST over the summer suggests that we should ignore what the sun does when we plan our lives.

Nice enough idea I guess but there's a problem with the reasoning. There's a reason why Greenwich Mean Time is called Greenwich Mean Time — I'll borrow a paragraph from Wikipedia to explain why:

Noon Greenwich Mean Time is not necessarily the moment when the Sun crosses the Greenwich meridian (and reaches its highest point in the sky in Greenwich) because of Earth's uneven speed in its elliptic orbit and its axial tilt. This event may be up to 16 minutes away from noon GMT (this discrepancy is known as the equation of time). The fictitious mean sun is the annual average of this nonuniform motion of the true Sun, necessitating the inclusion of mean in Greenwich Mean Time.

In other words, even when we're working with GMT, we're still "ignoring what the Sun does" (well, not really, but I'm trying to use the line of thought of the author of the petition).

And now for the gratuitous use of the word analemma, which gives me the perfect excuse to link to Anthony Ayiomamitis' amazing images.

Always double-check your dates

As I know from personal experience, it can be embarrassing when you get your dates wrong. But there are some dates you'd think some people would get right:

Around 60 people turned up to celebrate the Winter Solstice at Stonehenge - on the wrong day.

After negotiating with site-managers English Heritage, the crowd performed traditional solstice activities on Thursday morning, and left peacefully.

One reveller, who wished to remain anonymous, said: "We formed a ring and held hands, and touched the stones. The man with the green cloak was there.

"But there were an awful lot of red faces," she said.

Serves 'em right for not reading Stuart's Astronomy Blog. ;)