Roughly 24 hours from now, our planet reaches what we call the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. It is one of the two points in its 365¼ day trip around the sun at which the axial tilt is maximized, the other occurring in June.
We in the Northern Hemisphere experience tomorrow as the shortest day and longest night of the year. Our friends in the Southern Hemisphere have the opposite experience tomorrow, the longest day and shortest night of the year.
Tomorrow winter officially begins for North America, Europe and Asia, summer begins for those in Argentina and Australia. The farther from the equator one lives, the greater the differences experienced.
For Singapore - located on the equator - the seasons are no big deal. For near-polar Fairbanks and Ushuaia the solstices are dramatic. Twenty-four hour darkness for one, twenty-four hour daylight for the other.
Decades ago in mid June the DrsC were in Fairbanks, AK, traveling in our little motor home. Just for fun I stepped outside at 1 a.m. and, with much younger eyes, could read a newspaper in the slightly gloomy twilight. The arctic mosquitoes were pretty bad, as I remember, and I didn’t linger.
