Polar night returns to Utqiagvik

The sun set at 1:43 p.m. Sunday in Utqiagvik and won’t rise above the horizon again until Jan. 23, 2019, 65 days from today.

When a location experiences 24-hours of with no sunrise, it enters "polar night," which is the opposite of the midnight sun. It’s the time when the sun’s disk never rises above the horizon.

Polar night begins at the North Pole after the Autumnal Equinox and slowly spreads to the Arctic Circle through the Winter Solstice when it will begin to reverse.

A number of other locations in Alaska will move into polar night in the next couple of weeks. The sun sets for the year in Kaktovik on Nov. 24, 2018, and will rise again on Jan. 17, 2019. The last sunset of the year for Point Hope will be on Dec. 5, 2018, and the sun won't be back up for a little more than a month - on Jan. 6, 2019. Anaktuvuk Pass will see its last sunset of 2018 on Dec. 7, and the first sunrise of the new year about a month later on Jan. 4, 2019.