Summer Solstice 2013 - Two Days of Solstice

Summer is coming a little later for the East Coast than the West this year; arriving just after 1 a.m. Eastern Standard time on Friday, June 21. On the West Coast, though, they’ll be squeezing into teeny tiny bikini’s earlier –10:04 p.m. Thursday, to be precise.

That’s because a solstice - when the sun reaches it's northernmost point in the sky for the year - occurs at a single moment in time worldwide, 5:04 UTC, in this case. When the clock strikes 1:04 a.m. in Maryland Friday, it will be striking 10:04 p.m. Thursday out west.

It’s not unusual for the solstice to span two days, according to Weather Underground – over the past 52 solstices and equinoxes it’s happened 11 times in the continental United States.

During the solstice, we get the most sunlight of any day of the year. Kind of. We’ll see about 14 hours and 55 minutes of sunlight Friday. And we'll have the same amount of daylight Saturday according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.  

So enjoy the sun. There’s plenty of it in the forecast tomorrow, according to the National Weather Service, and temperatures should be in the low 80s.