Twice a year the sun will reach an extreme point in the sky. It's the day with the least amount of sunlight or the most amount of sunlight depending on where in the world you happen to be.

It's a day that almost every culture around the world recognized because it was the one day a year they could document by following the path of the sun.

Learn more about the solstice, how it works, and how it's been celebrated on this episode of Everything Everywhere, Daly. Let me start out by noting that the solstice is not a day while we recognize it as a day because it happens to result in the longest or shortest day of the year.

In reality, the solstice is just a moment.

In fact, if you wanted to get really technical, you could pinpoint the moment of the

solstice down to the very second. So what exactly is this moment which is called the

solstice? There are two solstice each year, a winter solstice and a summer

solstice. Which is which will depend on what part of the world you live in. A

solstice is when either pole of the earth is pointed at its maximum angle towards or away from the sun.

If one of the poles is pointed away from the sun, that hemisphere is having its winter or

hibernal solstice. If it's pointed towards the sun, it's

having its summer or estival solstice. When it is the winter solstice in the

northern hemisphere, it has to be the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere and vice versa.

The solstice has everything to do with the tilt of the earth.

The solar system has an imaginary plane running through it called the Ecliptic plane. This is the plane on which

the average location of the Earth's orbit rests. The Earth's axis is tilted approximately

23.4 degrees off of the ecliptic plane.

And if you really want to get technical, the tilt of the earth is 23.

4365-72-21-33 degrees away from the plane.

The poles are orientated at the same point in the sky,

which is why the North Star is the North Star all year long. The tilt of the Earth's axis, plus the fact that the

poles point at the same point in space, is what results in the seasons. If the Earth had no

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