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What time of year is there endless sunglight in Alaska?

Summer. We are getting there. Only a few weeks ago when I went to class at 6:00 P.M. it was dark out, now it is light out when I leave class at 9:00 P.M.
 
All of alaska doesen't see the midnight sun though, does it? Only central/northern?
 
Originally posted by: Eli
All of alaska doesen't see the midnight sun though, does it? Only central/northern?
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The further south you go, the less late night light you will get. Not sure what point the Midnight Sun cuts off at. Where I am they have a baseball game at Midnight played without artificial lighting (The Midnight Sun Classic I believe it is called) as well as various other Summer Solstice celebrations.
 
The endless daylight in summer and endless night in winter varies depending on your location in AK. In the upper part of the state the days are much much longer and in winter the sun never rises for a couple of months.

In the lower part of the state the sun will set for about four hours or so, but it doesn't completly get dark, more like twighlight then the sun starts to rise again. This is at the peak of the summer solstice of course, the night will gradually get longer.

Since you really don't have the extremes here in South Central Alaska, I find that it doesn't disturb me much, although I do prefer the darkness over the daylight but that's just me.
 
Anchorage's sunlight peaks on June 21st (obviously) with 19 hours and 21 minutes of daylight. The rest of the time is about a 2 hour sunset, then it gets light again.
 
Artic Circle is the cutoff point.
If your standing on the Artic Circle (66 degrees, 32 minutes N) on the Summer Solistice, the sun will drop to the horizon at midnight & rise back up again. Further north then that, you will have more and more days before & after the summer solistice where the sun never sets.

On the opposite side of the calender, at the winter solistice, the sun will just come up to the horizon, then go back down, from a vantage point on the arctic circle.

Note that 90 - 66.5 = 23.5 = the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer = the angle between the earth's pole and it's orbital plane.
 
Originally posted by: Moonbeam
ergeorge, do you know if the whole disk has to be up, or just a sliver?
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Was thinking about that myself. I think it would be the center of the disk. Fits with the whole angle thing since the orbit plane has to go through the center of the sun. But I'm not really sure what the formal definition is.

I guess you'll actually have a narrow zone of latitude that you could consider to be the "artic circle". The southern edge of that zone would be the point where the top edge of the disk just touches the horizon on winter solistice, and the northern edge would be where the bottom of the disk touches the horizon on summer solistice. The apparent diameter of the sun is roughly 0.5 degrees or 30 minutes ... so the zone would be about 0.5 degrees of latitude wide, or about 30 nautical miles.
 
The center does make sense. I also pictured the same thick line and wondered about but wasn't sure if it would indeed be the .5 degrees. Thinking about it a bit more though, it seems to make sense since it's .5 degrees of our horizon. That would make the artic circle line33 and a third miles wide?
 
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