Midnight Sun and Polar Night: Where, When, and for How Long
The concept is well explained everywhere. The dates for actual towns, which is what you need to book a trip, are not.
Above the Arctic Circle the sun stops setting in summer and stops rising in winter. Everyone knows this. What is surprisingly hard to find is when it starts and stops for a specific town, which is the only version of the fact that helps if you are planning to go.
| Town | Latitude | Midnight sun | Days | Polar night | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Longyearbyen | 78.2°N | 19 Apr – 24 Aug | 128 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 111 |
| Tiksi | 71.7°N | 10 May – 3 Aug | 86 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 68 |
| Utqiagvik | 71.3°N | 11 May – 1 Aug | 83 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 64 |
| Honningsvåg | 71.0°N | 12 May – 31 Jul | 81 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 61 |
| Hammerfest | 70.7°N | 14 May – 30 Jul | 78 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 59 |
| Vadsø | 70.1°N | 16 May – 27 Jul | 73 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 53 |
| Alta | 70.0°N | 17 May – 27 Jul | 72 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 52 |
| Kirkenes | 69.7°N | 18 May – 26 Jul | 70 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 49 |
| Tromsø | 69.6°N | 18 May – 25 Jul | 69 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 48 |
| Ilulissat | 69.2°N | 20 May – 23 Jul | 65 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 43 |
| Kautokeino | 69.0°N | 21 May – 22 Jul | 63 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 41 |
| Narvik | 68.4°N | 24 May – 19 Jul | 57 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 32 |
| Inuvik | 68.4°N | 24 May – 19 Jul | 57 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 31 |
| Svolvær | 68.2°N | 25 May – 18 Jul | 55 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 29 |
| Kiruna | 67.9°N | 27 May – 16 Jul | 51 | 1 Jan – 31 Dec | 22 |
| Bodø | 67.3°N | 31 May – 12 Jul | 43 | — | — |
| Sisimiut | 66.9°N | 2 Jun – 10 Jul | 39 | — | — |
| Rovaniemi | 66.5°N | 6 Jun – 6 Jul | 31 | — | — |
Reading the table
A few things in it are worth pausing on.
The two periods are not the same length. Longyearbyen has more days of midnight sun than of polar night. This is not a mistake. Atmospheric refraction lifts the sun's apparent position by about half a degree near the horizon, which extends the period when it is visible at both ends of the year and shortens the period when it is hidden. The midnight sun wins by roughly a fortnight.
Some places get one and not the other. A town a little below the Arctic Circle can have a few days where the sun does not quite set in June while still getting a sunrise every day in December, again because refraction has tilted the books in favour of the sun.
The Arctic Circle is not the boundary. The textbook line is 66.5 degrees, derived from the axial tilt. Refraction and the sun's own radius push the real boundary about a degree further south, so the effect starts a little below the line on the map.
What it is actually like
Midnight sun is not a long golden hour, which is the thing most visitors expect. At Longyearbyen in June the sun circles the sky without dropping below about 11 degrees of altitude. That is above the golden band entirely: the light is bright, flat and white for twenty-four hours. Photographers who travel for the midnight sun and arrive at the peak of it are often disappointed.
The good light is at the edges of the season. In the weeks either side, the sun spends hours skimming the horizon without setting, and the whole night is spent inside or near the golden band. On our golden hour page for Longyearbyen equivalents further south you can see this directly: for a stretch of the year the evening window is measured in hours rather than minutes.
Polar night is not darkness. The sun is below the horizon all day, but for most of the polar-night period it is not far below, so the middle of the day is twilight rather than night. Tromsø at 69.6°N keeps several hours of usable civil twilight through most of its polar night. Longyearbyen at 78.2°N does not: for the deepest weeks the sun stays more than 6 degrees down all day, and the brightest the sky gets is the deeper blue of nautical twilight.
That difference of eight degrees of latitude is the difference between a dim day and no day.
Both effects have a southern counterpart, but almost nobody lives there. The Antarctic Circle passes through ice and ocean; the only permanently inhabited places at comparable southern latitudes are research stations. The southernmost town of any size, Ushuaia at 54.8°S, is well short of it and gets an ordinary if extreme winter.
Planning around it
For the midnight sun, aim for the shoulders rather than the peak — late May or late July at Tromsø's latitude — unless the round-the-clock daylight is itself the point. The novelty of a bright midnight wears off faster than people expect, and sleeping is genuinely difficult without blackout curtains.
For the northern lights, you want the opposite: darkness, which means the polar night or the months either side. Aurora needs a dark sky as well as activity, and in June there is no dark sky anywhere near the Arctic Circle no matter what the forecast says. The season runs roughly September to March.
For polar night itself, the middle of the day is the usable window and it is short. In Longyearbyen in December, if you want to walk anywhere with natural light, you have a couple of hours around midday of dim blue and that is it.
How these dates are computed
Every row above comes from solving the sun's altitude for each of 365 days at that town's coordinates and counting the days where it never crosses the horizon. It is not derived from the Arctic Circle, not interpolated from a nearby city, and not copied from anywhere.
That matters because the numbers are sensitive. Move a few kilometres north and the counts change; the boundary dates shift by a day per few kilometres near the edges. A town-level figure and a "north of the Arctic Circle" figure are different things.
Refraction is included at the standard −0.833 degrees, which is why the midnight-sun periods run longer than the polar-night ones. A calculation that ignored refraction would produce symmetric periods and be wrong at both ends by about a week.
Where the towns are
The places in the table are real towns rather than points on a map, and most of them are reachable.
Tromsø at 69.6°N is the largest, with an airport, a university and a well-developed aurora industry. Rovaniemi sits almost exactly on the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. Kiruna in Sweden has the Icehotel and the Esrange space centre. Longyearbyen on Svalbard at 78.2°N is the northernmost town of any size on Earth and is the extreme case in every column.
Across the Atlantic, Ilulissat in Greenland sits beside a UNESCO-listed icefjord, and Utqiaġvik in Alaska at 71.3°N is the northernmost town in the United States, with about 65 days of polar night.
Each has its own page here with the exact dates, the day counts, and how far below the horizon the sun gets at midday during the dark period — which is the number that decides whether the middle of the day is dim or genuinely dark.