Winter solstice traditions and celebrations The summer solstice is when the sun's rays are farthest north over the Tropic of Cancer, giving us our longest day and the official start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. On those two days, everyone has an equal length of day and night. The equinoxes, both spring and fall, occur when the sun's rays are directly over the equator. What other seasonal transitions do we mark? Scientists are not entirely sure how this occurred, but they think that billions of years ago, as the solar system was taking shape, the Earth was subject to violent collisions that caused the axis to tilt. As the planet moves around the sun, each hemisphere experiences winter when it's tilted away from the sun and summer when it's tilted toward the sun. (credit: Getty Images) What causes the winter solstice to even happen?īecause our planet is tilted on its rotational axis, we experience seasons here on Earth. Major tourist destination, archeological and pilgrimage site during Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice. It sits inside the Arctic Circle and won't see a single ray of sunshine.Ĭlose-up view of ancient stones during sunset at UNESCO World Heritage Site at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK. But that's downright generous compared with Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Residents of Nome, Alaska, will be even more sunlight deprived with just three hours, 54 minutes and 31 seconds of very weak daylight on Tuesday.

It's a whopping 13 hours and seven minutes less daylight than these Finns get during the June summer solstice. and set at 3:12 p.m., resulting in less than six hours of anemic daylight. The difference is more stark in frigid Helsinki, Finland, where the sun will rise at 9:23 a.m. Much higher in latitude, Madrid, Spain, still logs in a respectable nine hours and 17 minutes of daylight during the winter solstice. People in balmy Singapore, just 137 kilometers or 85 miles north of the equator, barely notice the difference, with just nine less minutes of daylight than they have during the summer solstice. What places see and feel the effects of the winter solstice the most?ĭaylight decreases dramatically the closer you are to the North Pole on December 21. You might also try the conversion tools at, or. To check the timing where you live, the website EarthSky has a handy conversion table for your time zone. Because of time zone differences, the solstice will technically fall on Wednesday in parts of East Asia. Here are some examples of when 15:59 UTC will be for various local times in places around the world. That's almost six hours later than last year's time.

If you want to be super-precise in your observations (and who doesn't want to be?), the exact time of the 2021 winter solstice will be 15:59 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on Tuesday, according to and Farmers' Almanac. The time that the solstice occurs shifts every year because the solar year (the time it takes for the sun to reappear in the same spot as seen from Earth) doesn't exactly match up to our calendar year. The solstice usually - but not always - takes place on December 21.

Saturnalia winter solstice