Shiv Bhagwan

Lord Shiva

The God Shiva or Lord Shiva is the other great figure in the modern pantheon. In contrast to the regal attributes of Vishnu, Shiva is a figure of renunciation. A favorite image portrays him as an ascetic, performing meditation alone in the fastness of the Himalayas. There he sits on a tiger skin, clad only in a loincloth, covered with sacred ash that gives his skin a gray color. His trident is stuck into the ground next to him. Around his neck is a snake. From his matted hair, tied in a topknot, the river Ganga (Ganges) descends to the earth. His neck is blue, a reminder of the time he drank the poison that emerged while gods and demons competed to churn the milk ocean. Shiva often appears in this image as an antisocial being, who once burned up Kama, the god of love, with a glance.
But behind this image is the cosmic lord who, through the very power of his meditating consciousness, expands the entire universe and all beings in it. Although he appears to be hard to attain, in reality Shiva is a loving deity who saves those devotees who are wholeheartedly dedicated to him.
The bhakti literature of South India, where Shiva has long been important, describes the numerous instances of pure-hearted devotion to the beautiful lord and the final revelation of himself as Shiva after testing his devotees. Shiva often appears on earth in disguise, perhaps as a wandering Brahman priest, to challenge the charity or belief of a suffering servant, only to appear eventually in his true nature. Many of these divine plays are connected directly with specific people and specific sites, and almost every ancient Shiva temple can claim a famous poem or a famous miracle in its history. The hundreds of medieval temples in Tamil Nadu, almost all dedicated to Shiva, contain sculptured panels depicting the god in a variety of guises: Bhikshatana, the begging lord; Bhairava, a horrible, destructive image; or Nataraja, the lord of the dance, beating a drum that keeps time while he manifests the universe.
Because he withholds his sexual urges and controls them, Shiva is able to transmute sexual energy into creative power, by generating intense heat. It is, in fact, the heat generated from discipline and austerity (tapas ) that is seen as the source for the generative power of all renunciants, and in this sense Shiva is often connected with wandering orders of monks in modern India. For the average worshiper, the sexual power of Shiva is seen in the most common image that represents him, the lingam. This is typically a cylindrical stone several feet tall, with a rounded top, standing in a circular base. On one level, this is the most basic image of divinity, providing a focus for worship with a minimum of artistic embellishment, attempting to represent the infinite. The addition of carved anatomical details on many lingams, however, leaves no doubt for the worshiper that this is an erect male sexual organ, showing the procreative power of God at the origin of all things. The concept of reality as the complex interplay of opposite principles, male and female, thus finds its highest form in the mythology of Shiva and his consort Parvati (also known as Shakti, Kali, or Durga), the daughter of the mountains. This most controlled deity, the meditating Shiva, then has still another form, as the erotic lover of Parvati, embracing her passionately.
Shiva and Parvati have two sons, who have entire cycles of myths and legends and bhakti cults in their own right. One son is called variously Karttikeya (identified with the planet Mars) or Skanda (the god of war or Subrahmanya). He is extremely handsome, carries a spear, and rides a peacock. According to some traditions, he emerged motherless from Shiva when the gods needed a great warrior to conquer an indestructible demon. In southern India, where he is called Murugan, he is a lord of mountain places and a great friend of those who dedicate themselves to him. Some devotees vow to carry on their shoulders specially carved objects of wood for a determined number of weeks, never putting them down during that time. Others may go further, and insert knives or long pins into their bodies for extended periods.
Another son of Shiva and Parvati is Ganesh, or Ganapati, the Lord of the Ganas (the hosts of Shiva), who has a male human's body with four arms and the head of an elephant. One myth claims that he originated directly from Parvati's body and entered into a quarrel with Shiva, who cut off his human head and replaced it later with the head of the first animal he found, which happened to be an elephant. For most worshipers, Ganesh is the first deity invoked during any ceremony because he is the god of wisdom and remover of obstacles. People worship Ganesh when beginning anything, for example, at the start of a trip or the first day of the new school year. He is often pictured next to his mount, the rat, symbol of the ability to get in anywhere. Ganesh is therefore a clever figure, a trickster in many stories, who presents a benevolent and friendly image to those worshipers who placate him. His image is perhaps the most widespread and public in India, visible in streets and transportation terminals everywhere. The antics of Ganesh and Karttikeya and the interactions of Shiva and Parvati have generated a series of entertaining myths of Shiva as a henpecked husband, who would prefer to keep meditating but instead is drawn into family problems, providing a series of morality tales in households throughout India.

Sunset

 Sunset is the daily disappearance of the sun below the horizon as a result of the Earth's rotation.

The atmospheric conditions created by the setting of the sun, occurring before and after it disappears below the horizon, are also commonly referred to as "sunset". In astronomy the time of sunset is defined as the moment the trailing edge of the sun's disk disappears below the horizon in the west. Due to refraction of light in the atmosphere, the ray path of the setting sun is highly distorted near the horizon making the apparent astronomical sunset occur when the sun’s disk is already about one diameter below the horizon. Sunset should not be confused with dusk, which is the moment at which darkness falls, when the sun is about eighteen degrees below the horizon. The period between the astronomical sunset and dusk is called twilight.

The timing of sunset varies with the time of year and the latitude of the location from which it is viewed. The precise local time of sunset also depends upon each location's precise longitude within a given time zone. Small daily changes and noticeable semi-annual changes in timing of sunset are driven by the axial tilt of Earth, the spherical shape of the Earth, and the planet's movement in its annual orbit around the sun. Some apparent anomalies exist however, the main one caused by the Earth's axial tilt and the Earth's elliptical orbit. In the Northern Hemisphere, the earliest sunset does not fall on the winter solstice around December 21, but instead it occurs earlier in December. Likewise, the latest sunset does not fall on the summer solstice around June 21, but instead it happens later in June or in early July, depending on one's latitude. The same phenomenon exists in the Southern Hemisphere except with the respective dates being some time before June 21 in winter and some time after December 21 in summer, possibly in January of the following year. For one or two weeks surrounding both solstices, both sunrise and sunset get slightly later or earlier each day. Even on the equator, sunrise and sunset shift several minutes back and forth through the year, along with solar noon. This effect is plotted by an analemma.

Due to Earth's axial tilt, whenever and wherever sunset occurs, sunset is always to the northwest from the March equinox to the September equinox, and to the southwest from the September equinox to the March equinox. Sunsets occur precisely due west on the equinoxes, and the duration of day and night are approximately equal on the equinoxes for all viewers on Earth (precisely 12 hours if measured from the geometric (unrefracted) centre of the sun).

As sunrise and sunset are calculated from the leading and trailing edges of the sun, and not the centre, the duration of "day" is slightly longer than "night". Further, because the light from the sun is bent by the atmospheric refraction, the sun is still visible after it is geometrically below the horizon. The sun also appears larger on the horizon, which is another optical illusion, similar to the moon illusion.

The intense red and orange hues of the sky at sunrise and sunset are mainly caused by scattering of sunlight by dust particles, soot particles, other solid aerosols, and liquid aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere. These enhanced red and orange colors at sunrise and sunset are mathematically explained by the Mie theory or the discrete dipole approximation. When there are no particulates in the troposphere, such as after a big rain storm, then the remaining less intense reds are explained by Rayleigh Scattering of sunlight by air molecules. Sunset colors are typically more brilliant and more intense than sunrise colors, since there are generally more particles and aerosols in the evening air than in the morning air. Nighttime air is usually cooler and less windy, which allows dust and soot particles to settle out of the atmosphere, reducing the amount of Mie Scattering at sunrise. The reduced Mie Scattering correspondingly reduces the amount of red and orange scattered light at sunrise. Sunrise color intensities can however exceed sunset's intensities when there are nighttime fires, volcanic eruptions or emissions, or dust storms to the east of the viewer. A number of eruptions in recent times, such as those of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and Krakatoa in 1883, have been sufficiently large to produce remarkable sunsets and sunrises all over the world.

While ash and soot from volcanic eruptions tends to mute sunset colors when trapped within the troposphere, when lofted into the stratosphere, thin clouds of tiny sulfuric acid droplets from volcanoes can yield beautiful post-sunset colors called afterglows. A number of eruptions, including those of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and Krakatoa in 1883, have produced sufficiently high stratospheric sulfuric acid clouds to yield remarkable sunset afterglows (and pre-sunrise glows) around the world. The high altitude clouds serve to reflect strongly-reddened sunlight still striking the stratosphere after sunset, down to the surface.

Sunsets on other planets appear different because of the differences in the distance from the planet to the sun and in different atmospheric compositions.