Hills & Far Away: Solstice & Midsummer

It is June 21 today, the day of the Summer Solstice, and the longest day. Since childhood, I have assumed that the longest day of the year is also Midsummer's Day. However, by chance I heard an announcement this morning (about midsummer-related music) on Radio 3 that suggested I was badly wrong.

I have a gloomy and pessimistic haboit of saying, around the time of the winter solstice that "it's only about six months until the days start getting shorter again!". but today I can reverse tack, and exclaim "it's only about six months until the days start getting longer again!"

What are the facts?

Summer officially begins this week as the summer solstice marks the longest day of the year. For Americans, summer will begin either on Thursday or Friday-depending on which time zone you live in.

That's because the timing of the summer solstice depends on when the sun reaches its farthest point north of the Equator, and that varies from year to year.

This year's summer solstice falls on Friday, June 21, at 1:04 a.m. ET, but it will start on Thursday night for places in North America west of the Central Time Zone.

This year's summer solstice also stands out because it will be followed shortly after by the largest "supermoon" of the year. In the early hours of Sunday, June 23, the moon will officially reach its full phase and will be the closest to Earth that it will be all year.

The solstices are the results of Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.4 degrees relative to the ecliptic, the plane of our solar system. This tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet during Earth's yearlong orbit around the sun.

On the summer solstice this year, the North Pole is tipped more toward the sun than on any other day of 2013. (The opposite holds true for the Southern Hemisphere, where today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.)

As a result of Earth's tilt, the path of the sun across the sky rises in the lead-up to the summer solstice, then begins descending for the rest of the summer.

At high noon on the summer solstice, the sun appears at its highest point in the sky-its most directly overhead position-in the Northern Hemisphere.

That doesn't mean the sun will be exactly overhead at noon for everyone, though. In fact, the sun will shine down directly overhead at noon only along the Tropic of Cancer, an imaginary line that circles the planet at about the latitude of Cuba.

For every degree of latitude north of the Tropic of Cancer, the sun will appear to be at a corresponding degree south of the zenith, or highest point in the sky.

What of "Midsummer's Day"? That day appears to be a fixed "quarter day" ( one of four specified days when certain payments are due) and Christian Holy Day (St John's Day), celebrated over much of the world. It falls on June 24 each ear, and thus on Monday of next week.

Now back to the photograph! I have acquired a new camera ( so-called "bridge" between my trusty old Nikon SLRs (film), especially my F3, and their many lenses and the simple little Nikon Coolpix S520 compact that has introduced me to the digital world (I was developing film and making bromide enlargements by the age of 7!)

Since Solstice Day was a sunny day with blue skies, I thought that I would test the new camera on some local scenes, using the 18x optical zoom (equivalent focal length on a 35mm camera = 504mm). These are the fields just behind our house, with the sun-illuminated crops in the foreground showing interesting patterns. The farm building in the background is probably about 800m away.

The sun was still high when we returned home and sat in the garden with our G&T's. The extent of illumination of our tall birch tree shows the situation at 20:28. It was still quite light in the north-west at 22:30.

The days are getting shorter :=(