EDMONTON -- Today is the winter solstice: the shortest day of the year, longest night of the year, and the official start of winter.

Here are 6 things to know about this day.

  1. Edmonton gets 7 hours, 27 minutes and 42 seconds of daylight today. That's about about 9.5 hours less daylight than the summer solstice, which has 17 hours, two minutes and 42 seconds of daylight.
     
  2. The further north you are, the less daylight you'll receive. Fort McMurray gets 6 hours, 46 minutes and High Level gets just 6 hours, 19 minutes!
     
  3. The solstice is 6 seconds "shorter" than the day before (in Edmonton) and 24 minutes shorter than Dec. 1.
     
  4. The day after the solstice is only 1 second "longer" (in Edmonton). But, we'll gain 5-and-a half minutes of daylight by the end of December and almost half an hour by the end of January.
     
  5. On the summer solstice, the sun's direct rays are further south than at any other time of year, Tropic of Capricorn - a latitude of 23.5 degrees south. The earth orbits around the sun on a tilted axis. So, the sun's most direct rays it different parts of the earth at different times. (On the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun is directly over the equator and at the summer solstice, it's over the Tropic of Cancer).
     
  6. The earth is closer to the sun at the December solstice than at the June solstice. We're at 147 million kilometres from the sun today and approximately 152 million km from the sun in summer. Earth has an elliptical orbit and a tilted axis. It's that tilted axis (not the distance from the sun) that gives us the season. The north pole is tilted AWAY from the sun in the Northern Hemisphere's winter and TOWARD the sun in the summer.