Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The sun as seen at midnight during the summer within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- The sun shining at midnight in the arctic or antarctic summer.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
phenomenon occurring when theSun does notset , but only approaches thehorizon , at midnight; occurs near thesummer solstice in thepolar regions.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the sun visible at midnight (inside the Arctic or Antarctic Circles)
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treeseed commented on the word midnight sun
The midnight sun is a phenomenon occurring in latitudes north and nearby to the south of the Arctic Circle and south and nearby to the north of the Antarctic Circle where the sun remains visible at the local midnight. Given fair weather, the sun is visible for a continuous 24 hours, mostly north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle. The number of days per year with potential midnight sun increases the further poleward one goes.
There are no permanent human settlements south of the Antarctic Circle, so the countries and territories whose populations experience it are limited to the ones crossed by the Arctic Circle, i.e. Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and extremities of Iceland. A quarter of Finland's territory lies north of the Arctic Circle and at the country's northernmost point the sun does not set for 73 days during summer. In Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited region of Europe, there is no sunset from approximately April 19th to August 23rd. The extreme sites are the poles where the sun can be continuously visible for a half year.
_Wikipedia
February 19, 2008