It’s the Winter Solstise. December 21st is the first day of Winter and the shortest “day” of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere is basking in sunshine, of course.

Check out the North Pole (artic) webcam (it’s dark). It’s a mystery how Santa gets any work done - the place is in total darkness from October to March. Meanwhile, Antartic Adventures are in full gear at McMurdo. Antartic Webcams are alive and well. Is there Antimatter over Antarctica? An international team of scientists has launched a high-altitude, balloon-borne instrument from Antarctica to find out.

The North Pole Penguin webcam was installed at the North Pole in 2002. Running embedded Linux, the NOAA camera logs some four images a day (when the sun shines).

The images track the North Pole snow cover, weather conditions, and the status of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory’s North Pole instrumentation, according to James Overland, head of NOAA’s North Pole Project.

Although the webcam is capable of transmitting camera video at the rate of an image per second, NOAA keeps the device turned off except for just ten minutes every six hours, in order to conserve its solar-charged battery power.

Four times a day, the webcam wakes itself up and places a phone call to NOAA so that its data can be collected (the data is transferred by 2400 baud modem, through the Iridium low earth orbit satellite system, using PPP).

Polar orbiting spacecraft often dump their in-flight recorder data at Eielson AF Base or the University of Fairbanks at the Alaska Satellite Facility where the temperature is currently a brisk -14F.

Paul Winter has an annual Solstice Celebration on NPR with musical, theatrical and environmental events celebrating the return of the sun this day after the longest night of the year.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 12:57 am.