An incredible latest video demonstrates how Earth’s tilt changes all year long, causing days to elongate and shorten from north to south because the planet orbits the sun.
The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing the longest day of the 12 months as our planet reached the moment of the summer solstice today, June 21, at 10:57 a.m. EDT (1457 GMT).
The summer solstice is the moment when the Earth‘s Northern Hemisphere is most tilted toward the sun, subsequently receiving the utmost amount of sunlight through the day. Which means the day is the longest for the half of the planet north of the equator where the summer season is entering its peak.
Related: Stonehenge’s summer solstice orientation is seen in monuments all around the UK in amazing photos
But while the Northern Hemisphere is basking in sunshine, the Southern Hemisphere is trudging through its darkest day of culminating winter. From tomorrow on, the Southern Hemisphere’s day will begin to elongate while the Northern Hemisphere will start losing minutes of daylight.
The brand new video above released by Simon Proud, an Earth-observation scientist on the National Center for Earth Remark within the U.K., shows the terminator line, the boundary between the day and night, because it moves all year long.
“This video, using @eumetsat weather satellite data, shows how the sun appears to maneuver through the 12 months: It’s made using 365 pictures, all taken at 6 a.m. on every day over the past 12 months,” Proud said in a tweet.
As we all know, the sun doesn’t really move across the sky (though it does orbit the middle of our galaxy the Milky Way). Its apparent motion overhead is attributable to the Earth’s rotation around its tilted axes, which implies the arc the sun draws within the sky changes day-to-day, growing larger within the Northern Hemisphere from the winter solstice in December to the summer solstice in June and vice versa.
The video is a sequence of images taken by the European weather satellite Meteosat, which observes the planet from its perch within the geostationary orbit, an orbit at an altitude of twenty-two,200 miles (36,000 kilometers), where spacecraft appear suspended above a hard and fast spot above Earth’s equator.
The planet is now starting its move toward the autumn equinox, which takes place in September and which sees each hemispheres receiving an equal amount of sunshine on that given day.