Summer Solstice - things you may not know

[Dancing Wolf]

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“Generally, there’s a lot of food for a short period of time and animals have adapted to take advantage of those windows,” Thomas Jung, senior wildlife biologist with the Yukon Government, told Up Here magazine. Pikas, which are rabbit-like mammals, busily store piles of food under rocks for the darker times of the year; birds that normally do most of their singing around dawn keep calling all day and night.




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Alaska’s Chugach National Forest gets more than 20 hours of sunlight on the summer solstice, which leaves very little time for its resident bats to find food. A recent study found that they started hunting a little earlier and kept hunting a little later when they were far from buildings and roads—probably because those areas have less artificial light and more shady cover. Another researcher in Canada found that bats there spent less than two hours hunting on the solstice.




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Some humans get sad and anxious during the winter when there’s little daylight, and it turns out that nocturnal rats can have the opposite reaction. “For a rat, it’s the longer days that produce stress, while for us it’s the longer nights that create stress,” Nicholas Spitzer, a UC-San Diego biology professor, told the university’s news center. In his study, rats that were exposed to 19 hours of daylight and only five hours of darkness were less likely to explore the open end of a maze and less willing to swim.




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Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist and Sphinx expert, has observed that when a person stands near the Sphinx on the summer solstice, the sun looks like it’s setting halfway between the pyramids Khafre and Khufu. The sight is remarkably similar to a hieroglyph called akhet, which translates roughly as “horizon.” There’s no way to know whether the similarity is coincidental, but Lehner wrote in the Archive of Oriental Research, “If somehow intentional, it ranks as an example of architectural illusionism on a grand, maybe the grandest, scale.”




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During the third century BC, Greek astronomer and mathematician Eratosthenes (who also worked as chief librarian for the Library of Alexandria) knew that the sun on the solstice would be directly overhead in the town of Syene (now known as Aswan), Egypt, which lies almost directly on the Tropic of Cancer. North of Syene, in Alexandria, the sun always casts a shadow, even on the solstice, so Eratosthenes realized he could use the sun’s angle in Alexandria and the known distance between the two cities to figure out the Earth’s circumference. He was very close to the figure we now know to be accurate (24,902 miles), and he also figured out the Earth’s tilt.




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By some calendars, the Greeks marked the beginning of a new year on the solstice, and they celebrated the festival of Kronia in honor of the god of agriculture, Cronus. During the celebration, for just that one day every year, slaves were allowed to join in the feasts and games as equals with the free people. The solstice also marked the one-month countdown until the Olympic games.




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The Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming is a 28-spoked stone diagram laid out at the top of Medicine Mountain in the Bighorn National Forest. Researchers think it was built by Plains Indians between 300 and 800 years ago, and it could predict where the sun and other bright stars would appear in the sky. Two aligned points show where the sun rises and sets on the summer solstice, and other lines of sight track the stars Sirius, Rigel, and Aldebaran.




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El Caracol is considered the observatory at the Mayan city of Chichén-Itzá in the Yucatán jungle in Mexico. The structure’s front staircase corresponds with the northernmost position of Venus, and the building’s corners point toward the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset. Another structure in Chichén Itzá was built so that as the sun sets during the spring and fall equinoxes, shadows form the illusion of a snake moving along the staircase.




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Even though the solstice happens on the day of the year with the longest continuous stretch of daylight, it isn’t actually the day with the earliest sunrise. That falls a few days earlier, and the day with the latest sunset comes a few days after the solstice. This, again, is a result of the Earth’s tilt.




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It’s not just the period from sunrise to sunset that’s extended on and around the solstice. It feels like twilight lasts a lot longer as well, and that feeling is accurate. The sun simply never goes quite as far below the horizon as it does in the winter, so it rises and falls at a shallower angle and gives us more light, even though it’s technically out of sight.

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Daylight lasts almost 19 hours in St. Petersburg on the summer solstice, and Russia makes the most of it. During the White Nights festival, ballet and opera performances can start as late as midnight and many events take place outdoors, where the light never completely fades to full darkness.




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According to European legends, fairies and other mythical creatures were more likely to come out on the night of the winter solstice. This was likely the basis for William Shakespeare’s rowdy comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Remember: Midsummer is another name for solstice.) The story centers on Oberon, king of the fairies, his mischievous servant Puck, and the fairy queen Titania, who accidentally gets dosed with a magic potion that makes her fall in love with a human whose head has been transformed into a donkey’s. The fairies’ magic causes two human couples to fall in love with the wrong people, fight with each other unnecessarily, and get lost in the forest. Most everything has returned to normal by morning, naturally.




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A Cornell study that analyzed Twitter posts from about 2 million people around the globe found positive messages become more frequent as days got longer, and negative messages went up as days got shorter. More conclusive results showed people having identifiable peaks of happiness early in the day and then trending toward negativity in the evening, so make sure to really enjoy yourself the morning of the summer solstice.



Don’t miss these other astronomy facts that you probably missed in school:
https://www.rd.com/culture/astronomy-facts/1/


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