The winter high moved away and there were two weeks of rain before the webcam saw another cloudless day. By now the shadow’s really started to get a shift on, west yes but also a lot further south. The days are getting longer.

Not a cloud in the sky… another sparkling crisp day with pressure a rare high. We’d walked into the centre of town to make the most of the weather, amusing ourselves mid-miserable lockdown by pointing at fruffed up teals and spherical pelicans in St James’s Park. The Thames was like a mirror traffic-free under the windless high, as I’ve never seen it before.

One thing you can say about this time of year, the shadow’s westward movement certainly makes up for its feeble attempts to head back south. The graph plot hugely exaggerates the actual east-west movement, but using the Royal Exchange as a marker, there’s no denying the shadow’s heading west pretty quickly.

After a few cloudy days this counts as another lucky shot, with the east of the city under deep dark shadow there. But unlike the last, this day cleared up and I actually left the flat for a very cold walk along the river at Wapping in fast-fading orange light. It stayed clear and bitter all evening and that night the pond froze. A good time to rely on webcams.

Happy new year. Still locked down and with no end in sight. I’d got up late and it had clouded over, but the View told a different story and the tip of the shadow was just poking out above a broad expanse of shadow. A stroke of luck at least to start 2021’s leg of the analemma.

A few seconds earlier this shadow would have run up to the spire of the Royal Exchange, making it look like a white tip to its dark wedge. What might have been… As it was, it’s notable only for being the last shot of 2020, the last sunny midday of an awful, unprecedented and housebound year.

Now we’re talking. Not only is this the first shadow of the winter, the solstice having been three days and a couple of hours ago, but 24th December is a notable day in the analemma in London: one of only four days in which the Sun is directly due south. So this sharp shadow points true north today.

This is best seen on the diagram I’ve included in the Details section above, but let’s see it here too:

That lowest green dot marks the southern solstice, when the Sun is lowest in the winter sky in London. This plot has it on 22nd December, as it was in 2006 when the plot was made. Each red lozenge is marks the Sun’s altitude (that is, height above the horizon) and azimuth (east-west-ness) at midday GMT (or 1pm BST) on each day of the year. This is the pattern I’m mapping, projected on the City in reverse. The 24th December sees the Sun right on the 180 degree line.

The other three days the Sun is due south, counting along the 8-shaped track, are April 14th, June 12th and August 30th. I haven’t got any of those at the time of writing, so that’s something to aim for. Got to have a goal huh.