Tomorrow will be the longest day of the year for me. When the sun comes up at 2:08 am local time (about 10 minutes after having set), I will not see another night for about 1124 hours, when I get back to Christchurch. This doesn’t quite match the approximately 1270 hours of the longest day of my life—last year’s deployment—but comes pretty close.
So, as a memento, here is another awesome sunset I saw just before the nasty weather hit.
The last sunset I'll see in a long time.
Constant daylight is something that takes a little getting used to. You come out of the bar or a coffeehouse movie after an evening of entertainment and stumble into bright sunlight. It’s also nice because you can have natural lighting all the time. Of course, all windows in the dorms have to have opaque shutters to make the rooms dark enough for sleeping. When we’re sleeping in tents in the field, I have an sleeping mask to serve the same purpose.
On a final note, the weather today was quite beautiful, around -18 °C (0 °F), almost no wind. Tomorrow will be spent packing up and getting ready to head out. The batteries have to be brought to the cargo handling center for hazardous materials processing tomorrow, and the rest of our cargo delivered to the helo pad on Saturday.
Beautiful!
Wunderschön!! Guten Flug!