Google celebrates ‘Holi’ with a colorful doodle of ‘Spring Equinox’

New Delhi, Mar 20: Google doodles are always a hot topic in netizens. Google conveys messages by simple but beautiful doodles. Today’s Google celebrates the March 20 as the beginning of Spring season with cute little earth which has small pink flower blossoming as doodle ‘Spring Equinox’.

India welcomes the equinox on the day of Holi, the festival of colors.

The Spring equinox, a celestial event which marks the beginning of spring in many cultures. The term ‘Spring Equinox’ comes from the Latin word ‘equi’, meaning equal, and ‘nox’, meaning night. March 20 marks the arrival of the spring season in the northern hemisphere. On the equinox, people all over the world experience a day and night of equal length — almost exactly 12 hours. Besides, March 20 is also referred to as the vernal or spring equinox in the northern hemisphere and the fall or autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere.

The March Equinox is often used by astronomers to measure a tropical year, means time taken by earth to complete a single orbit around the sun.

The word ‘Equinox’ is used to mark the change of seasons, as a balance of light shifts to mark day longer than nights.

The earth has seasons because the planet is tilted on its axis, which results in each hemisphere receiving more direct light at opposite times of the year. But on the equinox, the earth’s axis is perpendicular to the sun. An equinox occurs two times in a year when the sun crosses the plane of the earth's equator. This Spring Equinox is extra special as the full moon is coinciding with it, a rare astronomical coincidence.

The spring equinox doodle’s reach extended all of Europe, Asia, and North America (including India), almost all of the Northen Hemisphere, where it is the first day of the season on Thursday.

On this doodle, Google expressed, “It usually means that it’s time to hunker down for the colder season or time to rise and shine for warmer ones, as in the case of our funny friend the mouse! You may also notice that on the equinox, the sun rises directly in the east and sets directly in the west, whereas at other time of year, it appears off- center if you are facing that direction”.