Either of the two times of the year when the sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator

Usage examples of solstice.

Henceforth this year would creep toward its low mark ever more slowly, pausing at the zero of solstice, obliquely peering through a certain slit at Stonehenge, and returning dumbly north, climbing the spine of the west, from the caude of Tierra del Fuego up the flex of Cordilleras, ending here, at what would be the nape of the Brooks range, the archaic brainstem of the planet, where, eons ago, a landbridge had offered passage to migrants from the east.

He would camp out in the cave overnight to await the precise moment of the winter solstice, half fearing and half hoping for another one of those fluky winter storms for which the Sleepers were locally infamous.

And however you calculate it, O great geometer, Cancer begins at midnight tonight, and announces the first day of the summer solstice.

Orion and Sirius rising heliacally just ahead of the sun at dawn on the summer solstice.

When the Vernal Equinox was in Taurus, he rose heliacally, that is, just before the Sun, when, at the Summer Solstice, the Sun entered Leo, about the 21st of June, fifteen days previous to the swelling of the Nile.

But Sandy was a witch, and Natil, as far as Sandy was concerned, was a witch, too, and so this feast of the first noticeable lengthening of daylight after the long darkness of the Winter Solstice, of the purification that went hand in hand with a preparation for the coming spring, had to be kept, even if it were kept a little late.

On this night of the summer solstice, the beginning of the three weeks of madness celebrating the rising of the river, Ptolemy the Second, called Philadelphus, stood on his balcony and looked out over the royal harbor.

Ptolemy, the day of the summer solstice, I measured the angle of the sun at high noon.

Syene, where the finest red granite is quarried, a tall pole casts no shadow at noon on the day of the summer solstice, and the sun shines directly into the wells.

It means the summer solstice, and great festivities throughout the land, going on for days.

On this night of the summer solstice, the beginning of the three weeks of madness celebrating the rising of the river.

The onyx floor tolled like struck bronze as the solstice charge surged down the lane.

England the winter solstice came down with a bitter antiphony of snow and frost.

Although some would like to believe the lines represent prehistoric runways for ancient astronauts, we now know them to be astronomically aligned, marking the positions of the winter solstice, the equinox, the constellation of Orion, and perhaps other heavenly bodies as yet unbeknownst to us.

And they lamented when, after the Autumnal Equinox, the malign influence of the venomous Scorpion, and vindictive Archer, and the filthy and ill-omened He-Goat dragged him down toward the Winter Solstice.