Saturday, July 07, 2012

SAC: The Arctic Circle and the Midnight Sun

Finally the numbers on the GPS ticked over until we could say for sure: "we are in the Arctic Circle".

We had done it.

We turned west to sail along the north coast of Iceland, getting up to 67N.

It was around then that I took the picture above: it's either sunset or sunrise but I'm finding it hard to work out which without checking the photo's time stamp and log book very carefully.

For this picture was taken around local midnight, up at the Arctic Circle, when sunrise and sunset lose their meaning.



(For those wanting a navigation exercise can you calculate our longitude from the fact that the camera was set to BST?)

6 comments:

Tillerman said...

I'm not very good at "natural" navigation but If the camera was set to BST and the iPad was running iOS 5.1.1 and the Iridium phone was on firmware version HT10001 and you were running iNavX Version 3.5.5 then I would say that you must have been about 12 degrees West.

O Docker said...

I'm not very good at "natural" navigation, but I'd say if you were thirsty it was sunset, but if your head felt like it was inside a bass drum that someone was beating, it was sunrise.

JP said...

Not quite right Tillerman, but close

Tillerman said...

Oh damn. I forgot to correct for the effect of the Iceland Triangle on iThings and the devaluation of the Icelandic króna.

O Docker said...

16 degrees, 15 minutes West?

JP said...

Gold star to O'Docker!

It wasn't *exactly* that as the camera time was off by a few minutes and there were a whole bunch of pictures taken around "midnight" of which that was a few minutes after - I'll have to check the log.

However the method used is right.