The soooooooooooolstice

[If you don't get that title, yer too darn young.] Tonight marks the summer solstice, the midpoint of summer (and what you'll hear many people mistakenly call "the first day of summer"). The exact moment of the solstice occurs at 05:45 on June 21, but that's June 20th in my part of the US (11:45 p.m. for me in Mountain time). What does this mean, exactly? Well, say you were to go outside every day and map the path of the Sun across the sky. It would make an arc, of course. If you were to note the height above the horizon where the Sun reaches the top of that arc, and continue to note it every day for a year, you'd see that at the summer solstice that apex is highest above the horizon and at the winter solstice it's at its lowest (southern hemispherites: swap those descriptions... and ...