Analemma proof science works

The equinox slipped past us this week. Not that most people noticed, of course. It doesn’t come with fireworks or speeches, just a quiet balance: day and night in near-perfect equality, the southern hemisphere leaning towards spring.

I marked the moment the way I often do, camera pointed skyward, tracking the Sun’s stubborn path. Over months, the daily photographs build into an analemma, a lazy figure-eight in the heavens. It’s beautiful, yes, but more than that — it’s proof — the Earth tilts. The Earth moves. The seasons shift. Science works.

There’s comfort in that. In a world gone noisy with opinion, the analemma is silent but undeniable. You can argue politics or football scores, but the Sun will still etch its slow curve, faithful to the physics of our orbit.

And yet, across the Pacific, science is being treated not as a foundation but as an inconvenience. The Trump administration has slashed funding for climate research, silenced experts, and even set about dismantling satellites whose only crime was recording the facts of our changing planet. Imagine that: destroying the very instruments that, like my camera in Dunedin, observe and report. Facts, not perceptions. Measurements, not hunches.

Worse still, a president with no training and no humility announced this week that taking Tylenol can cause autism. It is false. It is reckless. And yet in the current climate, a lie from a podium can travel further and faster than any peer-reviewed paper.

What is the world coming to, when centuries of careful observation can be tossed aside with a shrug?

I’m a humble astronomer, happiest when the night is clear and the stars spill overhead. I don’t pretend to have the answers to every riddle, but I do know this: science has earned our trust. It has lit the dark, mapped the seas, cured disease, and shown us galaxies far beyond our own.

We need to stand up for it. Not just the scientists, but everyone who benefits from antibiotics, clean water, satellites, or even the weather forecast. Which is to say: all of us.

The analemma in my photographs tells a simple story. The world turns. The tilt brings the seasons. Science works. Now it’s up to us to ensure that truth keeps turning, too — before those in power succeed in blotting it out.