The summer solstice is here. What to know about the longest day of the year

The northern hemisphere reached the summer solstice – the longest day of the year and the most intense sunlight, which is the official beginning of the astronomical summer. On the contrary, for those in the Southern Hemisphere, the shortest day and beginning of winter.

The term “solstice” is caused by the words “pause” or “stop” for the sun and “stitium”. This celestial event points to the highest annual arc of the sun in the sky, then begins to gradually retreat and leads to shorter days until the end of December.

For thousands of years, civilizations observed and celebrated their solstices by building monuments such as Stonehenge, which was fully aligned to the roads of the sun in these important moments. Understanding what emerges in the heavens requires a look at the Earth’s orbit mechanics.

As our planet travels around the sun, it does it on a curved axis. For most of the year, this inclination means that the sunlight and temperature are unequally distributed between the northern and southern hemisphere. Solstices, this axial slope occurs at the extreme point, which causes the most important inequality between day and night lengths. During the summer solstice of the northern hemisphere, the upper half of the world leans towards the direct sun and creates the longest and shortest night of the year. The winter daytime, on the contrary, sees that the northern hemisphere moves away from the sun and leads to the shortest day and the longest night.

Unlike Solsticees, the echinoxes are the periods when the axis and orbit of the world are aligned so that both hemispheres and both hemispheres are aligned to receive an almost equal amount of sunlight. The word “equinox” itself comes from Latin words, which means “equal” and “night”. These days are almost the same day and night. The northern hemisphere experiences the spring (vernal) equinox between 19-21 March and the autumn (autumn) crop between 21-24 September. In the equator, the sun is directly illuminated by both the north and south poles and the sun at the same time during an ecinox.

It is also important to distinguish astronomical and meteorological seasons. While the astronomical seasons are defined by the Earth’s definite movements around the Sun, the meteorological seasons divide the year fixed three -month periods based on annual temperature cycles. With this calendar, winter starts on March 1, June 1, September 1, autumn and 1 December.