Thursday 7 November 2013

Setting sun on Cape Bounty (it will be back)

Around this time of year, the sun disappears at 75 degrees north and won't appear again until early February.  In theory, it gets completely dark, but that is really not the case.  When the moon is out and it is clear, it can be quite bright, and the snow tends to make it less than pitch black anyway.  Regardless, for all the years we have worked at Cape Bounty, we have not seen a sunset.

We set up time lapse cameras in 2012 to photograph both lakes hourly to determine when the ice cover formed.  These images are the last for both cameras, suitably showing a sunset (West Lake) and a sunrise (East Lake), but snow covered the cameras that night and then the November darkness came, so we don't know what happened after that.  The cameras worked well in the cold temperatures, but stored thousands of black or blurred images.  We relocated the cameras for 2013-14, so hopefully we'll be able to get that last light around now...