When is winter solstice and the shortest day of the year?
When is winter solstice and the shortest day of the year?
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Fed up with it getting dark at 4pm? Well after Saturday, the days will start to get a little longer. The first day of the weekend - 21 December - marks the winter solstice, which brings with it the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Daylight will last for seven hours and 49 minutes in London.
From Sunday 22 December, days will start to get a little bit longer in the Northern Hemisphere, every single day until late June. The increase in daylight will be minuscule at first, just a matter of seconds a day, but will steadily grow until daylight expands by three minutes every day in March, according to weather forecast website Almanac.
The exact amount of brightness gained depends on where you are in the world. What is the winter solstice?. Also known as Yule, the solstice is a celebration of light and the symbolic rebirth of the sun. Scientifically, it is the time of year when the Earth is at its most extreme tilt toward or away from the sun.
The tilt means the Northern and Southern hemispheres get very different amounts of sunlight - and days and nights are at their most unequal. During the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice, the upper half of the Earth is tilted away from the sun, creating the shortest day and longest night of the year.
Meanwhile, at the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere is toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between 20 and 22 June. However, the dates of the equinox and solstice aren't fixed due to the Earth's elliptical orbit of the Sun.
