Happy summer: The solstice is Monday

The summer solstice — the annual moment at which the sun is the highest it ever gets in the sky — occurs Monday at 6:34 p.m. ET. This time also marks the beginning of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Specifically, the summer solstice is the moment when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer. This is the farthest north the sun ever moves in the sky, which is why the days close to the solstice have the most daylight of any days of the year. Monday, for instance, Washington, D.C., will have almost 15 hours of daylight and only about nine hours of darkness.

The amount of daylight will stay about that length for a few more days before slowing shrinking each day until the winter solstice in late December.

The solstice also brings the year's northernmost sunrise and sunset. 

And while it's the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere as folks down there are bundling up for winter.

Up here in the Northern Hemisphere ,the solstice is really only the astronomical beginning of summer. Meteorologists consider summer to be the hottest three months of June, July and August, which in terms of weather for those of us down here on Earth is more realistic than mid-June to mid-September.

The Climate Prediction Center's latest forecast for the remainder of summer is for warmer-than-average temperatures for most of the USA.

Druids and pagans will gather at Stonehenge in England to celebrate the solstice festival, which dates back thousands of years.

As an added bonus, for the first time in nearly 50 years, the summer solstice and the full moon will fall on the same day, AccuWeather reports. June's full moon is sometimes called the Full Strawberry Moon, as the Algonquin Native Americans knew that it signified that fruits, such as strawberries, were ripe for the picking.

The moon was full at 7:02 a.m. EDT on Monday.