The science of the solstice and its traditions have fascinated people for millennia.
? The differences in how much daylight you get become very dramatic as you get closer to the poles and farther from the equator. In Ecuador's capital Quito, barely north of the equator, people barely notice the difference. They get a measly extra six and a half minutes of daylight.
But residents of northerly Helsinki, Finland, will get a 3:54 a.m. sunrise and almost 19 hours of daylight. Even the night doesn't get that dark. The denizens of Fairbanks in central interior Alaska can scoff at those 19 hours. They'll get almost 22 hours of daylight, and blackout curtains might be in order.Folks all over the planet actually did get nearly equal doses of day and night back during the spring equinox.
"As Earth orbits the sun , its tilted axis always points in the same direction. So, throughout the year, different parts of Earth get the sun's direct rays," explains NASA. When the sun reaches its apex in the Northern Hemisphere, that's the summer solstice.Generally, it's not. "On average, the vast majority of the United States experiences its warmest temperatures in July or early August," says CNN Senior weather producer Taylor Ward.
"Temperatures essentially continue to rise after the summer solstice because the amount of energy coming in from the sun continues to be greater than the amount of energy lost at night – so it is basically an accumulation of warmth until the daylight gets short enough that this changes," says Ward.
The central axis of Stonehenge was aligned with the sunrise at summer solstice and sunset at winter solstice so that the stones precisely frame the rising and setting sun when days were at their longest and shortest. And it still works like clockwork in modern times.
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