It’s summer solstice today: What is it and what should you do on the first day of summer?
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Happy summer!
June solstice arrived this morning at 5:14 a.m., when the sun reached the Tropic of Cancer, which runs through The Bahamas and Cuba, marking the summer solstice, the first day of calendar summer, giving us the longest day of 2022.
Our summer bonus?
Today, we have more daylight than yesterday.
What exactly is summer solstice?
Unless we’re farmers or fishermen, our days are pretty much the same from a natural science perspective.
Air conditioning keeps summer’s furnace at bay. We set timers on the lights so we don’t come home in winter’s darkness. Unless you’re attuned to nuance, you may even be deluded into believing South Florida doesn’t have seasons.
Let’s review what we should have learned in elementary school science on summer solstice.
The solstice means the earth’s Northern Hemisphere has reached its maximum tilt toward the sun this morning, giving us our year’s maximum daylight of 13 hours, 45 minutes and 15 seconds by the time the sun sets at 8:15 tonight.
Blame our brief extra daylight on our subtropical latitude, where the days and nights don’t change in length as much as they do closer to the poles.
If we lived closer to the Arctic Circle, say in Oslo, Norway, the sun would shine for 18 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 10:43 tonight.
We experience the summer solstice as if the sun has moved north, but of course it’s the earth that’s moved in its orbit around the sun.
Despite what many of us think, summer is not hot because the earth is closer to the sun. Surprisingly, the earth and sun are the farthest apart in summer. Our seasons are created by the earth’s 23.5-degree tilt toward our star.
Here’s one last, ancient way to look at today, especially if you hate our long, smoldering South Florida summers.
Just change your definition.
This isn’t the first day of summer, according to no less an authority than the Bard of Avon. This is Mid-Summer’s Day, a pagan ancient Northern European festival celebrated around the June solstice.
When Shakespeare wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he was writing about the night of the summer solstice.
By those terms, maybe we can convince ourselves that we’re halfway through the season of torrents and torpor.
And after the summer solstice, our days will get shorter with fewer sunlight hours.
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This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Summer solstice: Facts about the first day of summer in South Florida
