At precisely 5:43 pm today, Saturday, June 20, 2020, we mark the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere-the day with the maximum amount of daylight hours where we live. While we celebrate the beginning of our summer, my family and friends in Australia, in the Southern Hemisphere, are marking the exact opposite-their winter solstice, or their shortest day of the year.

Most of us probably never think of ourselves as being passengers on-board a spinning planet that whips around on its axis of rotation once every 24 hours, or that travels 970 million kilometers on its 365-day journey around the sun. But we are! If the earth’s axis of rotation was perpendicular to the sun-earth line, we would have no solstices and no strong seasonal effects. However, Earth’s rotational axis — the imaginary line through our planet’s center and the geographic north and south poles — isn’t exactly at a right angle to the planet’s orbital path around the sun. Instead, it’s tilted at an angle of about 23.5 degrees from vertical— possibly as the result of a collision with another planet-sized object billions of years ago, when the solar system was forming

The summer solstice occurs at the moment in our 365-day year, when that tilt toward the sun is at a maximum. On this day, today, the June solstice, Earth is positioned in its orbit so that our world’s North Pole is leaning most toward the sun. As seen from Earth, the sun is directly overhead at noon 23.5 degrees north of the equator, at an imaginary line encircling the globe known as the Tropic of Cancer– named after the constellation Cancer the Crab.. This is as far north as the sun ever gets. As Earth orbits the sun over the course of each year, its axis always points at the same direction in space. That means the Northern Hemisphere is angled toward the sun for half the year and angled away from the sun for the other half.

“Solstice” is derived from the Latin words “sol” (sun) and “sister” (to make stand). To early astronomers, it literally meant the moment in which they observed the sun “standing still in the sky.” After this date, the days start getting “shorter,” i.e., the length of daylight starts to decrease, and although we now call it our “summer season,” we’re actually headed toward the next seasonal change, the autumnal equinox (September 22^nd in 2020), commonly called Fall-when the days and nights have equal amount of daylight and darkness-12 hours.

Ancient cultures knew that the sun’s path across the sky, the length of daylight, and the location of the sunrise and sunset all shifted in a regular way throughout the year. They built monuments, such as Stonehenge, to follow the sun’s yearly progress. Native American tribes of the Bighorn Mountains in present-day Wyoming once constructed stone wheels with 28 spokes in tribute to the Summer Solstice. This “medicine wheel” was aligned with sunrise and sunset on Solstice. Constructed at the top of a mountain range, the structure is only accessible during the summer months. Similar wheels have been found across South Dakota, Montana, and parts of Canada.

We refer to today as the “longest day of the year,” the day the “sun stands still in the sky.” Enjoy it-Celebrate it! Get Out and About today!

Chincoteague Island is located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The name chincoteague meant “Beautiful land across the water” in the language of the Native Americans who lived in the area-primarily the indigenous Assateague people. For visitors to this popular destination, there still seems to be some confusion of these two names-primarily when it comes to geography, so let’s try and clarify which is which, and where is where-me included!

First, they are both part of a chain of sandy barrier islands separating the mainland from the Atlantic Ocean. Assateague Island, on the ocean side, is a 37-mile long and skinny island that extends northward towards Ocean City, Maryland. Most of Assateague Island is protected parkland by the National Park Service’s Assateague Island National Seashore. Chincoteague Island sits immediately west of Assateague’s southern tip, protected from the ocean by Assateague. It rests comfortably within Chincoteague Bay. To add a bit more confusion to the mix, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains its Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague Island directly across a short causeway from Chincoteague Island and the town of Chincoteague. Got all that? Assateague is an island. Chincoteague is an island, a town, a bay and a wildlife refuge.

Even so, Chincoteague it still manages to hold onto a small-town feel unlike its Maryland and Delaware counterparts further up the Atlantic coast. This can probably be attributed to geographic isolation and government ownership of its beach. There will never be any commercial development allowed to build ocean-front hotels, boardwalks or any other businesses along the ocean waterfront here. The most famous residents, and attraction to this area, have four legs-the wild ponies.

Ponies have occupied Assateague Island since the colonial era although nobody really knows exactly how or when they arrived. The standing theory, and one that seems more exciting for tourists, is that they escaped Spanish galleons that shipwrecked off-shore.

Also “wild” ponies seem a bit of an exaggeration unless one defines wild to mean “mellow ponies without saddles.” Take the Assateague ponies five miles inland, drop them in a large field and nobody would bother to give them a passing glance. Stick the very same ponies on an island, combine them with romantic tales of Spanish shipwrecks and an iconic children’s book (Misty of Chincoteague-1947) and following movie (Misty-1961), then watch tourists gawk! Nothing has done more to transform Chincoteague from a fishing village focused on the bounty of the sea into a tourist destination harvesting travelers more than the renowned Misty mystique.

But it’s the natural features of the area-vast beach stretches and coastal salt marshes that attract thousands of migrating and breeding birds-and the reason I visit the Chincoteague-Assateague area as well. However, you must be patient, since there can be crowds of people coming to see the “wild ponies” and visiting the recreation beach. Even though it was fairly busy with people (there’s only one road in and out) the last weekend in May when I visited, I still managed to see 103 different species of birds-not too bad for trying to social distance from everyone else!