Day 24: Midnight Sun

Thursday marked the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. The sun set around 12:46AM, and rose shortly thereafter, sometime around 2:58AM. It's important to note that sunset and civil twilight are two different things -- sunset is defined at the time when the sun crosses the horizon, and civil twilight occurs once it is 6° below the horizon, and is a good approximation of what we consider to be too dark to do anything outside without another source of light. Astronomical twilight occurs even later, when the sun is 18° below the horizon, at which point it becomes "pitch black", and good for viewing the stars.

There hasn't been a civil twilight since I arrived a little less than month ago, and there's not going to be one until July 28th, over a month from now. The first Astronomical twilight won't be until September 5th.

With the Summer Solstice comes the Fairbanks Midnight Sun Festival, where "downtown" Fairbanks goes "all out", and throws a big street fair. For one day out of the year, "downtown" Fairbanks actually looks like a thriving city:


The rest of the year, it's pretty quiet, and the very few businesses that once occupied the storefronts here have been replaced by the local Wal-Mart. God Bless America.


As is par for any county fair or street fair, one of the streets blocked off contained nothing but classic cars. Although this sort of thing doesn't usually peak my interest, some of the cars on display were absolutely stunning. The car that caught my eye in particular was a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere, which might possibly have been the shiniest object I've ever witnessed (shown above). If not that, then at least she's looking better than her younger cousin in Tulsa. The interior of one car in particular (I forget the model) pretty much convinced me that industrial design has become a dead art (the picture doesn't even remotely do it justice).

In addition to the countless food vendors, merchants, and musical performers,
tucked away in the far corner of the fair was a disco-breakdancing competition. We stayed to watch it for a good 25 minutes, if only for the sake of the bizarre spectacle of it. Some of the performers were quite good, while others were rather awful. The one constant between them all was that every performer's self-confidence greatly exceeded his dancing abilities, to the point where they would dance-taunt their opponents. It was some sort of wonderfully bizarre cross between Zoolander, West Side Story, and Saturday Night Fever.


After the fair, the city presents one of its most hallowed traditions: the Midnight Sun baseball game, which this year, pitted the Fairbanks Goldpanners against some other minor-league team from San Diego. I don't think we ever actually figured out the name of the team from San Diego, although they did beat the 'Panners 6 to 1. Although the game actually starts at 10:30, it ran well past midnight without any sort of artificial lighting present. I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I can definitely say that I had a lot of fun at the game -- there was a huge group of highschoolers there (hypothetically from Michigan, though we were unable to confirm this) passionately rooting for the Goldpanners in the most boisterous way they knew how (right up until the last inning). Although this was obnoxious at first, they eventually gave out free kazoos and noisemakers, which made us pretty happy and boisterous as well.