Sometime in the last couple of days or so we had our first day of 24 hour sun. I’m not sure what the exact day it is, as we have had 24 hour light for some time now, and the hills encircling town make it impossible to see the event to the north.
For the next three months the sun will not set here, but make lazy circles in the sky, dipping lower in the north and rising higher in the south. The sun is quite warm now, and even though the air temperature still hasn’t gotten above 0, melting is happening. The roads are getting slick and muddy during the "day" and freezing solid during the "night".
By way of a primer on the phenomenon, the earth is tilted 23 1/3 degrees in relation to the plane of our orbit. As our summer approaches the north polar region starts to point towards the sun, and ends up always in sunlight, never in shadow. The number of days of 24 hour sun you experience depends on your latitude, from one a year at the Arctic Circle (which at 66 2/3 degrees is the point at which the sun does not set for at least one day a year), to the proverbial 6 months at the pole. Standing at the pole, the first and only sunrise of the year you would experience would take some thirty odd hours, from when the sun first poked above the frozen horizon, until it was completely visible. The entire sunrise would envelope you as it made over a complete circle around you.
I so enjoy the 24 hour light, even if it is easy to lose track of time. We’ve literally gone around the clock seal hunting, realizing only that a day had passed when sleep would over take you standing at a seal’s aglu.The micro climate that is our deck is warm and inviting and in sun for much of the day, I may even have the first barbecue of the season tonight. Now if only I had some blue cheese…
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I don’t know if I’d like it–the long days we’re having in southern Ontario now are enough to throw me for a loop–but I’d really like to give it a try some day.