Brilliant winter solstice sun for Alaska’s darkest days

Eric Muehling, one of Alaska’s best photographers, is a specialist of sorts in capturing the magic of the midnight sun for the summer solstice in Fairbanks and the equally impressive rays of the winter solstice.

The winter sun doesn’t attract the glory of summer’s all-night show, but the nature of the low-angled December light—tinting the landscape with a soft glow—is a case of quality instead of quantity.

And there are strange things done in the midday sun.

On Monday, drivers passing by on the Johansen Expressway may have thought they saw an ordinary plastic tub well off the road on the wide shoulder and assumed it had fallen out of a pickup truck and landed in the snow, but it was really an ingenious photography project. It required meticulous planning and clear skies.

The completed work is a wonderful time-lapse sequence taken from the Johansen Expressway in Fairbanks looking directly south on Peger Road from dawn to dusk.

I think that everyone in Alaska who wants to show relatives Outside what a December day looks like in Fairbanks ought to send along a link of this striking sequence. The camera was set to take an image every 10 seconds, compiling 1,932 frames from before dawn to after sunset.

From sunrise to sunset at this time of year in Fairbanks, it’s only a matter of 3 hours and 40 minutes, but you get a real sense of the short-lived experience when it is compressed into a video 75 seconds long.

I think this is Eric’s best winter sun series yet. Anyone who doesn’t live in Alaska and wants to know what it’s like in Fairbanks on the shortest days can see first-hand what the sun looks like on the ground. The sun rises in the southeast just before 11 a.m. and sets in the southwest at about 2:40 p.m.

Solar noon, when the sun is due south, occurs closer to 1 p.m. than to noon because when the Alaska time zones were scrambled to pack most of the state into one time zone, Fairbanks moved an hour ahead of where it should be.

Eric and I worked together more than 40 years ago at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. It was during his years at the newspaper that he first began experimenting with ways to shoot the solstice sun. It’s not a new idea, of course. For almost as long as Fairbanks has existed, photographers have made multiple-exposure images of the sun to share with the world.

In Muehling’s early days as a newspaper photographer, he used real film and the process required him to hang out from sunrise to sunset, manually shooting photos every 15 or 20 minutes. He did this when the skies were clear, which almost always means the temperature is cold. In Fairbanks, cold begins somewhere between 20 below and 40 below.

The film would not be advanced inside the camera, so a single frame of the film would be exposed multiple times, with his Nikon camera set to an aperture of F/22 at a shutter speed of 1/800th or 1/1000th of a second. The result would be up to 12 exposures on the same frame, each one showing the sun at a different point on its arc.

He now uses a Canon EOS 70D and set it up inside a covered and insulated plastic tub on the Johansen Expressway bridge over Peger Road for this project. He cut a hole in one side of the tub with the zoom lens, which was set at 14 mm, pointed due south.

To keep the camera and other equipment warm enough to function on a 6-below day, Muehling put a headlamp inside the tub, powered by a 12-volt deep cycle battery.

He set the aperture at f/8 and at solar noon the shutter speed was 1/640th of a second. The camera sensitivity was set to ISO 100.

The results are spectacular.