Summer Solstice

Did you celebrate the Summer Solstice on Saturday? We had lots of fun with visitors at the museum, making sun dials and teaching folks about the Sun. Check out this neat video showing the dancing atmosphere of the Sun.

Image Credit: Wikipeda Commons.

The Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year; in Peoria we had 15 hours of sunlight! We have solstices and equinoxes because of the Earth's tilt on its axis. While the Earth orbits the Sun, one hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun while the other is tilted away. The hemisphere that is tilted toward the sun gets more direct sunlight than the opposite hemisphere, and so is in summer. 
The June Solstice is the day that we are most tilted toward the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere, so the Sun takes the longest time to go from sunup to sundown. In the Southern Hemisphere, June 21 was the shortest day of the year. 

Check out the video below to see the light of the Sun on the Earth change over a full year.  A satellite orbiting Earth took a picture of our planet at the same time each day, starting at the Fall Equinox. You can watch the Northern Hemisphere go into winter, to spring when the shadow is vertical, to summer, and back to the Fall Equinox in just 13 seconds!  


Check out a few more awesome pictures of our star below: 

Image Credit: Alan Friedman, an amazing astrophotographer. This is the Sun imaged through a calcium filter, show the chromosphere, a thin layer of the Sun's atmosphere.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO. An eruptive prominence became unstable and blew out into space over a 5-hour period. September 24, 2013.

Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This image shows the Sun in all the wavelengths that SDO can observe in - most invisible to the human eye.

If you like seeing epic pictures of our Sun, I highly recommend check out the Solar Dynamics Observatory website. This amazing telescope stares at our star 24/7, capturing its dynamic nature every day! 

To learn more about our Sun and the other stars of the Milky Way galaxy, visit the Dome at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. See a full list of showtimes and descriptions here.