The calendar confirms what the thermometer indicated Wednesday: Summer is officially here. June 20th marks the first day of the new season and it got YNN's Chris Whalen thinking about some popular legends about summer.

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BROOME COUNTY, N.Y. -- With temperatures reaching 90 degrees in Binghamton, summer took no time settling in. Wednesday marked the summer solstice, meaning the new season is officially here.

"The earth is tilted toward the sun right now. The sun is highest in the sky," said Roy Williams of Kopernik Observatory.

That translates into the greatest amount of daylight and least amount of darkness for a single day of the year.

"The sun has to be 18 degrees below the horizon before it gets totally dark out, so really, what you're looking at, total darkness tonight, about five and half hours," Williams said.

Now that summer's here, we can all do a lot of things that we couldn't do during the winter and spring and maybe even do some things we never knew we could do at all. Take for instance the old urban legend that you can balance an egg on a table on the summer solstice.

"That could happen. It could also happen any other day. There's no change in gravity or anything that would cause eggs to balance on any other date. Eggs will balance on any day if you're good at balancing them," Williams said.

Theoretically, if the weather is hot enough, you should be able to crack an egg and fry it on the sidewalk. Unfortunately the weather Wednesday didn’t seem to be hot enough, because contrary to popular belief, the summer solstice isn't always the hottest day of the year.

"During the winter time, the Northern Hemisphere has cooled off and now that we're tilting toward the sun, we are getting longer days and we're getting more direct sunlight, but it takes a while to warm up the Northern Hemisphere, so there's about a lag time of about six weeks before we typically reach our highest temperatures," said Williams.

What is true is that the day ushers in the traditionally warmest months of the year and begins our decent to the shortest day of the year: The winter solstice, which falls on December 21st.