The Peak of the 2025 Summer Solstice Is Coming, Along With Celebrations – Here’s What to Know

• The summer solstice will occur on June 20, 2025, in the northern hemisphere. This marks the first day of summer and is the longest day of the year.

• For a moment, before it turns back around and heads south, the sun will briefly appear to stand still. That’s where the word “solstice” comes from — in Latin, sol means “sun” and sistere means “to stand still.”

• The summer solstice meant a lot to our ancient ancestors, who closely tracked the movements of the sun.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, days are growing longer, and life is getting brighter. Each day the sun rises a little higher in the sky, adding a couple minutes to the morning and evening. This happy trend will peak on June 20, 2025, when the sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky, during the summer solstice, before it once again starts to recede toward autumn and winter.

That’s what will happen from our point of view, anyway. If you could zoom out and watch from farther out in the solar system, you’d see a different version of events.

“This is all tied into the fact that the Earth is going around the sun,” says Jonti Horner, an astronomer at Australia’s University of Southern Queensland.

Earth, like a planet-sized Leaning Tower of Pisa, doesn’t stand straight up. Its axis (the line running between the north and south poles) is tilted by about 23.5 degrees. So, once in each solar orbit, that tilt points straight at the sun, bringing maximum light to the northern hemisphere — and almost 90 percent of the world’s population.

This marks the summer solstice, otherwise known as the first day of summer and the longest day of the year.

Technically the solstice is not a whole day, but rather the precise moment when the axial tilt points most directly at the sun. It occurs at the same instant for the entire planet, which means the exact timing depends on your time zone.

For the east coast of the United States, it will take place at 10:42 p.m. on June 20, 2025. In the southern hemisphere, where Horner lives, he notes that “it's entirely the opposite way around.”

As the sun climbs closer to the north pole, it sinks farther from the south pole. That part of the planet points directly away from the sun.

While North America, Europe, and Asia experience the summer solstice, Australia, southern Africa, and most of South America will simultaneously experience the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Read More: The World's Oldest Solar Calendar Might Have Been Discovered in Turkey

From either perspective, the sun has been moving in a northerly direction for nearly six months. At noon on the solstice, it will finally reach a northern limit: 23.5 degrees north of the equator, a latitude known as the Tropic of Cancer.

For a moment, before it turns back around and heads south, the sun will briefly appear to stand still. That’s where the word “solstice” comes from — in Latin, sol means “sun” and sistere means “to stand still.”

In between the summer and winter solstices are the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which mark the start of spring and fall. On these days the sun rises directly overhead at the equator, which is the midpoint between the Tropic of Cancer and its southern counterpart, the Tropic of Capricorn.

Across the entire planet the nights and days are nearly equal, about 12 hours each.

Celestial events held tremendous significance throughout much of human history, in a way most 21st-century minds can scarcely comprehend.

“Our connection to astronomy […] is actually nowhere near as strong as the traditional owners of the land in a given country,” Horner says. “People were much more in tune with the day length and the seasons.”

The solstices were major turning points for our observant ancestors. They closely tracked the movement of the sun, and famously built many ancient monuments — like Stonehenge and some Mesoamerican pyramids — in alignment with its position at the northern and southern extremes.

For some cultures, the winter solstice symbolized the sun’s triumph over darkness, heralding a period of renewal and the coming of another agricultural season. The confirmation of longer days ahead was often an occasion for feasting, according to Horner.

“The time of hardship and living off stored meats and all the stuff you prepared at harvest time, was going to come to an end,” he says. “People had good reasons for celebrating this stuff.”

The summer solstice, by contrast, gave rise to “midsummer” festivals partway through the growing season. These were especially common in Britain, Norway, Sweden, and other parts of northern Europe. Many have survived into the modern era, complete with maypole dancing, ceremonial bonfires and other festivities.

Read More: Stonehenge May Be an Ancient Solar Calendar

There are plenty of sites across North America that were astronomically important to indigenous peoples, from Serpent’s Mound in Ohio to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. If you happen to live near these or any others, they may host solstice events.

Otherwise, you can simply soak up some knowledge along with those sweet summer rays. Even if you remember most of what you learned about the solstice in school, “there’s always another secret,” as Horner put it — a deeper layer of complexity to appreciate.

For one, it’s a common misconception that Earth gets hotter in summer because we draw closer to the sun. But actually the difference between perihelion and aphelion (the points in Earth’s orbit where it comes nearest to and farthest from the Sun, respectively) is too small to change climatic conditions much — in fact, we’re closest to the sun in January. Instead, the big temperature swings come mainly from the direction of Earth’s tilt.

Here’s another surprise: Although the solstices and equinoxes divide the year into four roughly equal chunks, these seasons are not precisely the same length; if you add up all the days between each equinox and solstice, you’ll find that “three months” is only a crude estimate. For the northern hemisphere, there are 89 days in winter, 93 in spring, 94 in summer and 90 in fall.

That’s because of gravity. When Earth gets closer to the sun in winter, the stronger gravitational pull sweeps it along faster through its orbit. When it gets farther away in summer, the sun’s gravity weakens and that stretch of the orbit takes longer. So, if last winter felt bleak, just remember that summer is about to start paying you back — with 5 days’ interest.

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• Brilliant Maps. How Much of Humanity is on Your Side of World?

• Oxford Latinitas. Etymology corner: solstice

• Royal Astronomical Society. Solstices at Stonehenge

• The Power of Stars. How Celestial Observations Have Shaped Civilization 2011 Edition by Penprase, Bryan E. published by Springer

• Sweden Midsummer. One of the favourite feasts in Sweden is Midsummer. It involves dancing, magic and a sun that never sets.

• National Park Service. Summer Solstice Celebration

• Astronomical Applications Department. The Seasons and the Earth's Orbit

Cody Cottier is a contributing writer at Discover who loves exploring big questions about the universe and our home planet, the nature of consciousness, the ethical implications of science and more. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University.