Summer solstice is officially tomorrow — but those extra hours of sunlight are tonight

(Image credit: Richard Hamilton Smith/CORBIS)

published 20 June 2017

For those who are always fretting about not having enough time in the day, today is your day. While the summer solstice technically happens on Wednesday at 12:24 a.m. ET, it's Tuesday that's getting that blissful extra bit of sunlight.

On the summer solstice — the longest day of the year and the first official day of summer — the sun sits directly overtop the Tropic of Cancer, which rests at 23.5 degrees north latitude. The positioning of the Earth relative to the sun allows the Earth's northern hemisphere to bask in more direct sunlight on the summer solstice than on any other day of the year. The southern hemisphere celebrates the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year — on the day the northern hemisphere celebrates the summer solstice.

The precise number of extra daylight hours you'll get depends on your latitude: Places farther north get more hours of sunlight than more southern locales. So while most parts of Texas will get about 14 or 14.5 hours of sunlight Tuesday for the summer solstice, Boston will get 15 to 15.5 hours of daylight.