Solstice: Day 24

Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice. From here on out the far north will begin its gradual advance towards brighter days. Due to the axial tilt of the earth, northern latitudes face away from the sun this time of year, shortening the overall day length. This becomes more exaggerated as you move towards the north pole. Looking at the photo above, you can see here in Fairbanks the sun barely manages to creep above the mountains before dipping back down again to the south. The lines between sunrise and sunset become blurred. To achieve this photo, I drove up to Ester Dome to escape the valley ice fog, and positioned my camera so that the sun would rise on the left side of the frame. Unfortunately my intervalometer stopped working, a device that automatically trips the shutter on a programmed interval, so I had to manually get out of my warm truck and take a photo every twenty minutes. This took a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes, from 11:10am to 2:30pm. I then brought all eleven frames into Photoshop and used a simple blending tool called "lighten", which takes the brightest information from each photo and mergers them into a simple image. The same tool works great with star trails.

If you're curious about what our days are up to in Fairbanks, or wherever you are, you can check out the following link. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/fairbanks

Canon EOS 60D, Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM, ISO-100 f/20 aperture priority, 11 frames 20 min apart