TIME LAPSE: 24 hours of the midnight sun

Monday, August 15, 2016, 12:28 PM - Most people know that, during the summer months, the sun just doesn't set in the high Arctic. 

But it's one thing to know, and another to see it happen in time lapse.

The video above was shot by Witek Kaszkin at a Polish polar station in the Norwegian island archipelago of Svalbard. To give you an idea of how far north that is, it's about as far up there as the hamlet of Grise Fiord on the southern shores of Ellesmere Island ... which is Canada's northernmost inhabited civilian settlement.

The video is less than two minutes long, but it's mesmerizing to see the sun get no further than the horizon, never quite disappearing behind the jagged peaks of the Svalbard wilderness.

The way it works has a lot to do with the tilt of the Earth's axis, as the photographer explains:

The area around the equator is consistently close to the sun, but the areas around the poles are not. As the Earth orbits around the Sun, that tilt makes the North Pole face towards the sun in summer (keeping it in sunlight even as the Earth spins) and away from it in winter (keeping it dark). This means that the Pole gets continuous sunlight (yes, even at midnight) during the summer, but doesn't get any sunlight at all during the winter.

This was shot in late April, 2015 (it's been making the rounds again after being featured in Slate's Bad Astronomy blog). A little after the spring equinox, but long before the summer solstice, the actual longest day of the year.

Kaszkin is clearly a master of photography with some good gear and a good vantage point. Here's his time lapse of 2015's total solar eclipse: 

H/T: Bad Astronomy