By Gus Saltonstall
The Winter Solstice is on Saturday, which means it will be the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, including on the Upper West Side.
The Winter Solstice officially begins at 4:20 a.m. on Saturday, marking the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It also means that December 21 will be the longest night of the year.
Sunset will occur just after 4:30 p.m. on Saturday in New York City, but there are positives to take from making it to the shortest day of the year. From Sunday through the end of June, each day will now get longer as the sun continues to set slightly later.
On the Winter Solstice, Earth’s Northern Hemisphere is at its most extreme tilt away from the sun.
The Winter Solstice generally signifies new beginnings and a return of light, and there have been celebrations and traditions that date back centuries.
Humans might have first celebrated the Winter Solstice as early as 10,200 B.C., during the Neolithic period, according to the History Channel. Some monuments, including Newgrange in Ireland and Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, align with sunrise on the Winter Solstice.
The Romans celebrated the Winter Solstice with a holiday called Saturnalia, a week-long celebration in honor of the god of agriculture. The ancient Norsemen of Scandinavia celebrated Yule for the Winter Solstice, which lasted for around a month.
The Winter Solstice will be a cold one in New York City. The forecast for Saturday is a high of 33 degrees, before temperatures fall even more Sunday and Monday to between 16 and 30 degrees.
You can learn more about the Winter Solstice — HERE.
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True … but the earliest sunset of the year was back on Dec 10. Since then, sunsets have been getting a bit later every day. For night owls like me, the earliest sunset date is actually more interesting than the shortest day. The changes in sunrise are not symmetrical with the changes in sunset. Weird, eh?
More accurately, it occured on December 12th, when the sun set at 4:28PM.
Even more accurately, to the nearest minute, sunset for the UWS was at 4:28 pm from Dec 3 to Dec 11. So the “real” earliest sunset, pedantically speaking, was probably in the middle of that range, around Dec 7. But anything more “precise” than the nearest minute or two turns out to be pretty meaningless thanks to atmospheric conditions and the like.
Source #1: https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/table.php?lat=40.791533&lon=-73.976163&year=2024
Source #2: https://aa.usno.navy.mil/calculated/rstt/year?ID=AA&year=2024&task=0&lat=40.7915&lon=-73.9761&label=NYC+UWS+&tz=5.00&tz_sign=-1&submit=Get+Data
Having not read the article until later, my thought jumped directly to this question: Is it just my imagination or was this fabulous sunset photo of the NYC skyline intentionally shot to resemble Stonehenge? Also very important historically around the solstices!!!