Although high temperatures have reached practically all of Spain for a few weeks, the truth is that there are still a few weeks left to welcome summer 2023. Let’s see when the longest season of the year begins.
The beginning of the summer season in the Northern Hemisphere is marked by the summer solstice. Curiously, summer coincides when the Earth is as far away as possible from the Sun in its elliptical movement around the sun.
The heat that arrives at this time has to do with the inclination of the planet’s axis; lightning strikes more directly in our hemisphere during these months.
That summer is the longest season is explained by Kepler’s Second Law: the line joining the Earth to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Because the Earth is in its positions furthest away from the Sun, it moves with less speed, which translates into a longer duration of the season.
From the National Astronomical Observatory, they point out that on the day that summer begins, the Sun reaches its highest elevation above the horizon at noon and describes the longest arc in the sky. It is the day with the most hours of sunshine of the year. Also, for several days the maximum height of the Sun at noon appears to not change, and because of this, the beginning of summer is also called the summer solstice. In fact, the term solstice comes from the Latin ‘solstitium’, which means “still sun”.
It is not entirely trivial to look for when summer begins, since the start of the season can occur on three different dates, always between June 20 and 22, depending on how the sequence of calendar years fits (leap or not) with the tropical year, that is, the duration of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Thus, throughout the 21st century, summer will begin in Spain on June 20 and 21, its earliest beginning being that of the year 2096 and the latest start was in 2003.
According to calculations by the National Astronomical Observatory, astronomical summer 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere (and winter in the South) officially begins with the solstice, which will occur at 4:58 p.m. on Wednesday, June 21. The duration of the summer will be 93 days and 16 hours, until September 23, the day on which autumn will begin.
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