Sun at Midnight

Saturday was cloudy all day. Low cloud on the mountains out my back door. I had booked a Midnight Sun excursion. The company phoned – not looking good for tonight. I said I’d like a drive anyway, to see a bit more of the island.

Of course with daylight saving, it really should be the “1am Sun” but no one mentions that.

I hadn’t given much thought previously to the actual (apparently) path of the sun. Yes, I do know that it’s not the sun that’s moving …

We’re used to the sun rising in the east, spending the day in the northern sky, and setting in the west. In the northern hemisphere, that’s ‘spending the day in the Southern sky’.

But during the ‘midnight sun’ period when there are long (even 24) hours of sunlight, the sun appears to do a circle overhead (well ok not actually overhead, it’s still fairly low in the sky for much of the time) – starting somewhere in the NE, having the day in the southern sky, ‘moving’ to the NW and then finally at midnight (or 1am) actually being north. Before ‘going around’ again. It’s all very counter-intuitive. Doing my head in.

So we went looking for the sun in the gathering gloom of a cloudy day/evening.

There is the Atlantic Ocean. Next stop Greenland. (We are north of Iceland here.) and there, a bit above the horizon, the sun is trying to look at us. Orange rays emanating from the cloud just above the horizon. But no actual sun to see. We made a couple of stops but no improvement.

At about 11:30pm we decided to give up on it, but I got out a compass to check if it really was close to north …

I was hopeful that sometime in the next few nights I’d get lucky but the forecast is for cloud for the rest of the week. So maybe not.