Say goodbye to fall and, officially at least, hello to winter as the yearly solstice occurs tomorrow, Thursday evening at 9:27 p.m. CST when Earth’s axis will be titled the farthest away from the sun! This moment in time marks the sun’s position over the Tropic of Capricorn, an imaginary latitudinal line at 23.5° south of the equator. This is as far south as the sun ever gets relative to our Earth.
Bringing us our shortest day of sunshine (10hours 14minutes and 2seconds for Houston) according to Time and Date, the sun will now begin moving north from the Tropic of Capricorn toward the Equator (our spring equinox) and eventually to the Tropic of Cancer (our summer solstice) before moving back south again. By the way, the sun isn’t actually in the constellation Capricorn right now, it’s in Sagittarius, but it WAS back 2,000 years ago when all this began.
What’s special about this year’s winter solstice for us and our northern hemisphere? This year’s solstice is occurring at the latest time for the rest of this century! So if you’ve been waiting for winter, it’s finally here!
Technically, the solstice is occurring in Universal Time on Dec. 22 at 3:27 a.m. UTC which is Dec 21 at 9:27 p.m. CST for us. Through 2049 we only have five more times the solstice occurs on the 22nd, but none happen as late as tomorrow’s does. From 2050 to 2099, there are NO December 22nd occurrences. During that period, the winter solstice will happen 45 times on December 21st and 5 times on the 20th. What about December 23rd? Well, that happened back in 1903 but won’t happen again until 2303! That’s going to be a long wait.
Of course, it’s the summer solstice for our friends below the equator. Location, location, location! You can read much more about the solstices and equinoxes right here.
Does this have anything to do with a colder or warmer winter? Nope.
RELATED: When can we expect our first freeze?
As for this upcoming first winter weekend, it looks to be warm and damp!
Frank
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