NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 20, 2026, featured an analemma photographed near the village of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, UK. The composite was assembled from images taken every few days at noon over the course of a year, showing how the Sun’s position in the sky changes from the same spot and time.

The foreground shows the Callanish Stones, a stone circle built around 2700 BC during the Bronze Age. According to the explanation, it is not known whether the stones’ placement has or had astronomical significance. The figure-8 shape of all analemmas arises from the tilt of Earth’s axis and the ellipticity of its orbit around the Sun; at solstices the Sun appears at the top or bottom of the loop, and equinoxes correspond to middle points rather than the intersection.

The image was taken near the December solstice, so the Sun appears near the bottom. The page also noted that the equinox would occur two days after the September 20 entry, and that APOD’s main NASA site was moving from apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod.