I have had often been delightfully perplexed regarding the Land of the Midnight Sun, imagining how the Sun could be shining at ‘midnight’!! I have the delight of sharing with you a link to a video that records “at 1:06 you see a single scene from day to night to day which is from 9pm to 7am. Think about that for a minute.. 10 hours with light like that.” It also clearly shows us the trajectory of the sun on a little slice of the horizon that helps those of us who are accustomed to the Sun crossing the skies from east to west to understand the phenomenon. Wikipedia: The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months in places north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle, when the sun remains visible at the local midnight. Around the summer solstice (approximately June 21 in the north and December 22 in the south) the sun is visible for the full 24 hours, given fair weather. The number of days per year with potential midnight sun increases the farther towards either pole one goes. Although approximately defined by the polar circles, in practice the midnight sun can be seen as much as 90 km outside the polar circle, as described below, There are no permanent human settlements south of the Antarctic Circle, so the countries and territories whose populations experience it are limited to those crossed by the Arctic Circle, i.e. Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut), Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). A quarter of Finlands territory lies north of the Arctic Circle and at the countrys northernmost point the sun does not set at all for 60 days during summer. In Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited region of Europe, there is no sunset from approximately 19 April to 23 August. The extreme sites are the poles where the sun can be continuously visible for a half year. The opposite phenomenon, polar night, occurs in winter when the sun stays below the horizon throughout the day. Since the axial tilt of the Earth is considerable (approximately 23 degrees 27 minutes) the sun does not set at high latitudes in (local) summer. The duration of sunlight increases from one day during the summer solstice at the polar circle to several weeks only 100 km closer to the pole, to six months at the poles. At extreme latitudes, it is usually referred to as polar day. At the poles themselves, the sun only rises once and sets once each year. During the six months when the sun is above the horizon it spends the days continuously moving in circles around the observer, gradually spiralling higher and reaching its highest circuit of the sky at the summer solstice. Source Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 06:45:23 +0000
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