The Winter Solstice happens tonight at 11:27pm. Here’s a question though…Do you know what the Winter Solstice is?
I do now…thanks to the Farmer’s Almanac .
The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year. What does that mean? It’s the day that has the fewest hours of sunlight throughout the year.
It also means the start of winter.
What’s really cool, is the fact that the winter solstice occurs once a year in each hemisphere. Once in the Northern Hemisphere in December and once in the Southern Hemisphere, in June. It marks the start of each hemisphere’s winter season.
So, when one hemisphere is experiencing its winter solstice, the other is simultaneously experiencing its summer solstice! That really is a head scratcher but that’s how it is!
This is all thanks to Earth’s tilted axis, which makes it so that one-half of Earth is pointed away from the Sun, and the other half is pointed towards it at the time of the solstice.
The solstice lasts only a moment. It’s the exact moment when a hemisphere is tilted as far away from the Sun as possible.
