Happy summer solstice!

The Summer Solstice happened earlier this year than others I've checked before. The exact minute of this years summer solstice was 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) . It's now officially summer, and today is the longest day of the year. I used to wonder if anyone has ever measured that with the extremely accurate clocks we have these days. There's always some wobble to the Earth such that times can move around with days milliseconds longer or shorter than predicted. Today is supposed to be 0.3664 milliseconds (or 366.4 microseconds, if you prefer) longer than 24 hours.  

Screen capture from TimeandDate.com

The sunrise/sunset app I have on my phone (really old - I think it's not supported anymore) says sunrise this morning was in the minute it calls 6:26 AM. The earliest sunrise of the year was called 6:25 AM and the phone app said sunrise was 6:25 from June 2 until June 19. Sunrises will get later every morning from here until the new year. Sunset, meanwhile is 8:21 and doesn't reach the latest sunset of the year, 8:23, until June 25 and stays there until July 8th. After that, sunsets get earlier until around the end of November. 

You were expecting symmetry?

It's there, but not what most people seem to expect. Sunrise and sunset don't both move smoothly getting earlier and later reaching their min/max on the solstice. In the summer, the earliest sunrise is before the solstice, latest sunset is after. In the winter, the earliest sunset is before the solstice, late November/early December and latest sunrise is after it - the first week of January. That seems like mirror image symmetry. I should emphasize this in the northern hemisphere. I've never checked this pattern in the southern hemisphere.

I went looking through the blog history searching for articles on this and found that I've only written about the summer solstice a couple of times before, but have written about the winter solstice more times. That's probably at least partly because I greatly prefer our winter over our summer, so I look forward to the winter solstice more.

If you've ever spent time with a good globe, you'll know about an analemma, that shows the motion of the sun - usually shown as seen from the equator. I've posted one pretty picture an amateur took of the sun that recorded the phenomenon for a full year. That was in a winter solstice post.