Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica

Virtual Tour - Life at the South Pole: Sun Links

When you're at the Pole, the Sun doesn't rise and set every day. It rises at one equinox and sets at the other, giving 6 months of day and 6 months of night. When living under these conditions, you can well imagine that sunlight (or the lack thereof) is a pretty big deal!

A bit of background

On the previous page, we've just collected a few pictures pertaining to sunlight. For more information about the path of the Sun (and the Earth's revolution, rotation, and tilt), here are several resources. All of these links take you out of the CARA Virtual Tour. Use your browser's "Back" button to return here.

The Earth and Moon Viewer has a very nice interactive setup whereby you can request a view of the planet, including "night" and "day", from any latitude, longitude, and altitude. For example, try these:
- The view right now. Is the Sun up at the Pole itself? Near the Pole? In order for you to answer this question for any given date, you need to have a pretty good sense of where the Pole is in the relatively featureless Antarctica. On the other hand, for some extremes, you can get the point even if you don't know where the Pole is. Here are some images I pulled down for particularly extreme dates. Note how (and when) the illuminated portion changes, even if you don't know exactly where the Pole is.
- Current aggregate weather satellite image of Antarctica using this same interface.
Sunrise and sunset around the world from penguincentral.com. Generates graphs of when the Sun rises and sets at any latitude and longitude. Includes samples.
Our sister site southpole.com has a lab exercise about the Sun and its path through the sky for observers at different latitudes.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific has a lab on the seasons on line.
Everyday Classroom Tools has a large collection of Sun-related labs.

Go back to the Sun Page.

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CARA's research and education programs are supported in part by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement, grant number NSF OPP 89-20223. © Copyright 1998,1999,2000 by Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. This copyright applies to all web pages and images created by CARA.

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Last modified Thursday, 15-Jul-1999 13:50:14 CDT
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/pole/dome/life/sun/sunlinks.html