Ask most people when Earth is closest to the Sun and they will say summer. It makes a tidy kind of sense: closer to the fire, warmer the room.
On July 6, 2026, Earth reaches the farthest point from the Sun in its entire orbit for the year, a moment astronomers call aphelion. It happens at about 17:30 UTC, around midday in the central United States, in the thick of northern summer. Half the planet is running air conditioners while Earth sits at its greatest remove from the star that warms it.
What happens on July 6
At aphelion this year Earth will be 94,502,961 miles from the Sun, or about 152.1 million kilometers. Six months from now, in early January, it will swing in to its closest point, called perihelion, at roughly 91.4 million miles. The gap between the two is a little over three million miles, around five million kilometers.
Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun on July 6, in the middle of northern summer, and the backward timing is the clearest sign the seasons don't come from distance
Ask most people when Earth is closest to the Sun and they will say summer. It makes a tidy kind of sense: closer to the fire, warmer the room.
Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun on July 6, in the middle of northern summer, and the backward timing is the clearest sign the seasons don't come from distance
Earth fully lit by the Sun, photographed by the crew of Apollo 17 (the Blue Marble). Credit: NASA / Apollo 17, public domain.
Ask most people when Earth is closest to the Sun and they will say summer. It makes a tidy kind of sense: closer to the fire, warmer the room. The assumption is also, for the Northern Hemisphere, exactly backward.
On July 6, 2026, Earth reaches the farthest point from the Sun in its entire orbit for the year, a moment astronomers call aphelion. It happens at about 17:30 UTC, around midday in the central United States, in the thick of northern summer. Half the planet is running air conditioners while Earth sits at its greatest remove from the star that warms it.
What happens on July 6
At aphelion this year Earth will be 94,502,961 miles from the Sun, or about 152.1 million kilometers. Six months from now, in early January, it will swing in to its closest point, called perihelion, at roughly 91.4 million miles. The gap between the two is a little over three million miles, around five million kilometers.
That sounds enormous until you set it against the whole distance. Earth’s average separation from the Sun, the figure astronomers use to define the astronomical unit, is about 93 million miles. The orbit is very nearly a circle, just slightly off. Across a full year our distance from the Sun changes by only a little over three percent.
The word itself is plain once you take it apart. Aphelion comes from the Greek apo, away from, and helios, the Sun. Away from the Sun. That is where we are in early July, though not by much more than usual.
Why early July, and not always
Earth’s farthest point does not lock onto any calendar landmark, though it lands suspiciously near one. Aphelion arrives about two weeks after the June solstice, and perihelion about two weeks after the December solstice. It looks like a pattern, though it is closer to a coincidence.
The dates also wander. Because the shape and orientation of Earth’s orbit shift slowly under the pull of the Moon and the other planets, the timing drifts by roughly a day every 58 years, and can move a day or two from one year to the next. By the same reckoning, the December solstice fell on the very day of perihelion back in 1246, and thousands of years from now perihelion will have slid around to the March equinox. The July timing we treat as fixed is just the arrangement that holds in our era.