The winter solstice is incredibly beautiful in America’s northernmost city
Watch the sun crawl across the horizon in this time lapse from Fairbanks, Alaska.
Fairbanks, Alaska, America’s northernmost metropolitan area, is just 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. On Wednesday, it will see just three hours, 41 minutes, and 33 seconds of sunlight. That sunlight will barely creep over the horizon line. And the sun will crawl across the horizon — like a sailboat skimming across a pond — throughout this incredibly short winter solstice day.
In 2012, Taro Nakai, a weather researcher, captured the icy beauty of this phenomenon in a time lapse.
As Vox’s Brad Plumer has explained, the winter solstice happens due to the axis of Earth’s rotation. “So between September and March, Earth’s Northern Hemisphere gets less exposure to direct sunlight over the course of a day,” he writes. “The rest of the year, the north gets more direct sunlight and the Southern Hemisphere gets less.”
At the extreme latitudes, that makes a huge difference in the daylight hours season to season. Fairbanks gets about 18 more hours of sunlight during the summer solstice in June than it will today.
Here’s another cool way to visualize the extreme of the winter solstice. In 2013, a resident of Alberta, Canada — several hundred miles south of Fairbanks, but still in a high latitude — took this pinhole camera photograph of the sun’s path throughout the year, and shared it with the astronomy website EarthSky. You can see the dramatic change in the arc of the sun from December to June.
(You can easily make a similar image at your home. All you need is a can, photo paper, some tape, and a pin. Instructions here.)
This is a 6 month pinhole photo taken from solstice to solstice, in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. We are one of the sunniest cities in Canada, and this shows it nicely.
Posted by Ian Hennes on Saturday, December 21, 2013
Though it is the darkest day of the year for us in the Northern Hemisphere, many still find reason to celebrate. For instance, this was the scene at Stonehenge earlier this morning, where pagans, druids, and other revelers gathered to celebrate the sunrise as it lined up directly with some of the stone monuments.
And even if paganism isn’t your thing, there’s at least one thing to celebrate in the Northern Hemisphere. For the next six months, the days will grow longer once again.