Sunrise 5:47 am: Summer solstice on the lake

On their run around Lake Lagunita this morning (frogs still hopping; ducklings still swimming), the Dawn Joggers missed the summer solstice, marking the longest day of the year, by about 10 hours. According to an interesting web site, Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy, the date and time of the 2006 solstice is June 21 at 12:23 am universal time. Universal time is the number of hours, minutes and seconds which have elapsed since midnight (when the sun is at a longitude of 180 degrees) in the Greenwich time zone. With both England and the U.S. West Coast on "summer" aka daylight savings time, that means the solstice occurs in the Bay Area at 4:23 pm today. The longest day of the year must, in reality, be marked by seconds of difference, not minutes, as the sunrise and sunset have been at the same time for the last few days and will be the same time again tomorrow.