Watch: Arctic Circle’s Summer Sky Time-Lapse; Where The Sun Never Sets
One of the funny things about living on a big spinning ball of rock and metal in space is that what you see depends on where you are.
Where I live, in Colorado, the Sun rises every day, makes an arc in the sky, then sets some time later. The same is probably true for you, too. What’s really happening is that we’re affixed to that spinning ball, and as it sweeps us around we move in a tilted circle, sometimes on the side of the Earth facing the Sun, sometimes facing away, but always in motion.
That view changes dramatically with latitude. If you go far enough north, then after the (northern) Vernal Equinox in March, the Sun never sets. The Earth’s North Pole is tipped toward the Sun, and even though it spins some parts of the Earth are in constant daylight, and remain so for months at a time.
I’ve seen time-lapse videos taken from cameras fixed to a tripod, showing the Sun moving around in a circle (or sweeping back and forth over the horizon). But what does it look like if, instead, the camera tracked the Sun’s path along the horizon as it moved?
That video, created by Witek Kaszkin, is pretty amazing. It sweeps along, moving horizontally as the Sun does too, keeping the horizon in the same place. As the Earth spins, the Sun bobs up and down over the course of a day, and also moves all the way around the sky. It’s a peculiar way of showing the motions, but I like how it shows the Sun’s change in altitude over the day, rising and sinking, but never setting … it almost does, but in reality it just gets behind some tall, distant mountains.