Astronomy for Beaker People

I am indebted to a correspondent on Twitter who informs us that today the sun is at perihelion (or was, just after midnight).  Makes very little difference to the temperature but if you look very hard at it (DON'T!) you might notice it is slightly bigger.  Except you didn't look very hard at it yesterday (or if you did you're reading this bulletin in Braille) so you have no baseline.  All of this makes very little difference to our day-to-day lives, but it is reassuring to know that we have an aphelion and perihelion.  The alternatives being that we would fly off into space, or spiral into the sun.  Both of which would be fairly nasty.  I mean, think of the fossil fuels we'd have to burn if we shot into space.  That would really kick-start global warming.

* Image from Wikipedia.