A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
midnight sun
The midnight sun is the sun visible at local midnight, which happens in summer anywhere inside the polar circles. At the circle itself, it occurs on one day of the year; at the pole it runs for six months. The sun does not rise and set but circles the sky at a steady low angle, dipping toward the horizon around midnight and climbing again, so the light is a long continuous low golden raking that photographers travel a long way for.
Etymology
The English term is a plain compound and translates the equivalent phrase in the northern languages directly. Its counterpart is the polar night, when the sun does not clear the horizon at all, and the Norwegian and Swedish words for that season are on the same pattern. The Sámi calendar handles the whole thing differently, dividing the year into eight seasons rather than four, geassi.
Notes
Refraction extends it. The atmosphere bends light around the curve of the earth by roughly half a degree, so the sun appears above the horizon when it is geometrically just below it, which pushes the midnight sun a little south of the polar circle and adds a day or two at each end. On a flat sea horizon at high latitude, the effect can be considerably larger.