According to Hawaii News Now, the summer solstice arrived for Hawaii at 11:43am today. What's the summer solstice? I watched this National Geographic video to find out.
Summer solstice is the longest day of the year. It's considered the start of summer. On this day the North Pole is tilted most directly to the sun. For the Northern Hemisphere this day has the most hours of daylight. (For the southern hemisphere, it's the opposite.)
USA Today also had a cool video explaining the summer solstice.
Here are some facts I learned:
Solstice means "sun standing still" in Latin
Solstice was an important event in some ancient societies
It is one of the earliest astronomy related events people observed
When looking up summer solstice, I saw a lot of stuff about something called Stonehenge. This NatGeoKids article said that it's an ancient circle of stones that humans made over 5,000 years ago in England.
Nobody knows how they moved the huge stones in place. There is a legend that said giants placed the stones on a monument in Ireland but the wizard Merlin moved them to England and put them in a circle. No one knows why it was built but on the summer solstice, the sun rises right above one of the stones.
Every year, people go to Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice. Here's a video from CNN of the solstice in 2018.
I also found this USA Today article that was called Manhattanhenge.
It doesn't happen on the same day as the summer solstice but four times a year the sunrise/sunset lines up perfectly between the New York City buildings, kinda like Stonehenge. Thought that looked pretty cool.
It wasn't really for summer solstice but my brother and I got to draw on the concrete outside on the lanai with the chalk my mom was able to finally find in the store. We drew a few suns, a lizard and a bucket. We also played with some bubbles. My dad made hot dogs and we sat outside for dinner. The NationalDay.com site where I look for daily holidays said hot dogs are the #2 summer food Americans want. Number 1 was hamburgers.
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