Sunburst
An analemma is the result of a year-long series of photographs of the sun, taken one week apart at exactly the same minute every week. A certain day and a specific time must be set aside each week for one whole year to take each shot and the process cannot be hurried or shortened.
However, there are not fifty-two separate photographs. Instead, all
fifty-two images are on one negative so that when it is developed, it is a
single picture of fifty-two shots outlining the sun’s apparent path for the
year.
It is not seen as one straight line but rather as an elongated, tilted, figure
eight made of a large loop and a much smaller one. In the southern
hemisphere it comes out as a smaller loop on the lower side and a large loop
above it. In the northern hemisphere, it is the other way round.
I recently held in my hand the completed snapshot of the sun’s pathway for
the past year taken by my husband. It is an awesome image, probably the
first of the southern hemisphere and it represents a journey of millions of
miles through space, traveling at something like eighteen miles a second.
Of course, the sun is accompanied on its journey by the earth, the moon and
the planets who belong to the system so it is a ‘family’ journey.
Each member of the family can observe all the others at various times and
stages although these family members are not on the photograph.
It is almost as though the sun has said to its family of followers, ‘There
is no darkness where I am and you take on my identity as we travel together.
Even when you are not individually named, you are still a part of me and are
my family. You shine with my light, we travel the same single pathway,
and you will never travel alone.’
So the picture of the analemma I hold in my hand is a Sunburst Bible. It
tells me I travel in light, on a single pathway, and I am one of a family.
I shine with the light of Another and He who is my identity says ‘I will
never leave you or forsake you,’ Hebrews 13:5.
Are you ready for a Sunburst journey, too?
Elizabeth Price
eam writer with Just a Minute
PS. It may be the first time the analemma has been recorded on a single
frame of film in the southern hemisphere - Elizabeth.