Today is the first day of summer for this area. The summer solstice actually began at 11:24 last night for the Central Time Zone of the United States, which would make this the first full day of summer and the first day period for summer. This will be the day with the longest period of daylight, with sunrise at 5:31 this morning and sunset not until 8:25 pm—giving us just shy of 15 hours of daylight today. Compare that to the shortest daylight of the year, December 21st, when we only have about 9.5 hours of daylight. After today our amount of daylight will shrink each day until winter solstice on December 21st.