Midnight solar flare

Around this time of year, we have the midnight sun and one very long day! The midnight sun is nicely viewed from KAIRA and it is always calm and peaceful. Of course that's not always the case at the sun itself.

A few weeks back we caught a solar flare very close to the local solar midnight. Due to the equation of time, the application of daylight-savings/summer time in Europe, and our location, the minimum elevation of the Sun is not exactly at clock midnight.

However, very close to the point of minimum elevation (and the Sun crossing the northen meridian), KAIRA caught this solar flare.

Midnight solar flare! (Image: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Given that the elevation of the sun was quite low (approx. +2 degrees), this must have been a bright flare!

Our northern summer solstice occurs at 10:51 UTC on 21 June 2014.

Midnight sun

Today we just have a nice photograph of the midnight sun taken from KAIRA.

Midnight sun seen from KAIRA (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Summer solstice

Well, the moment of solstice is upon us. Happy midsummer, everyone. And have a nice weekend too!

Sunshine at "night" over the KAIRA site. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Winter solstice 2012

Another year is almost done and today is the winter solstice. It is also a Friday so, in the tradition of pretty photographs for the end of the week, here is one for that... at the winter solstice too.

Winter solstice at SGO. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The photograph was taken looking across the antenna fields; not at KAIRA, but at the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. Of course, being in the Arctic the sun does not rise above the horizon, but it is only just below it, giving a strange ethereal twilight above the snowy landscape.

Have a nice weekend (and winter solstice too!)

Mid-summer

When viewed from the earth, the sun appears to not only move from east to west each day (due to the earth's rotation about its axis), but it also appears to move against the background stars (due to the earth's motion about the sun). The times when the sun reaches its highest and lowest point with respect to the stars (specifically the maximum and minimum points of declination) are the solstices. At the moment of solstice, the sun stops moving north (or south) and starts heading back the other way.


This year, the summer solstice occurred at 17:16 UTC on the 21-June-2011. This post has been made at the exact moment.

The weekend following the solstice is the mid-summer break, which is widely celebrated throughout Fenno-Scandinavia. The KAIRA construction project will take a few day's break during this time (although we'll continue to post web log articles... if nothing but to try to catch up on the back log!).


PS: The photograph is genuinely the view across Siilasjärvi at midnight on 18^th/19^th June 2011. For the solstice itself (well, with 5 minutes to go as I type this), it was 5 degrees celsius... and raining hard.