Our planet does not spin on a perfectly vertical axis \u2014 it is tilted.<\/p>\n
This tilt causes the amount of sunlight that reaches different regions of Earth to change throughout the year as it orbits the Sun.<\/p>\n
For half the year the northern half of the Earth is tilted toward the Sun.<\/p>\n
On the summer solstice the northern hemisphere is tilted most directly toward the Sun, and the Sun appears directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer.<\/p>\n
Without this tilt we would still experience weather but not distinct seasons, as the amount of daylight would remain nearly constant throughout the year.<\/p>\n
The word solstice comes from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), referring to the apparent pause in the Sun’s movement across the sky.<\/p>\n
Despite being the longest day of the year, the summer solstice does not have the latest sunset or the earliest sunrise. <\/p>\n
The earliest sunrises happen before the summer solstice and the latest sunsets happen after. <\/p>\n
You can check sunrise and sunset times where you are on the BBC Weather app<\/a> and website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our planet does not spin on a perfectly vertical axis \u2014 it is tilted. This tilt causes the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-641287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}