The Longest Day (written by Chris)

As Kirsten noted, yesterday was the summer solstice, the most daylight of the year, or the most we're likely to get, ever. The official numbers were that sunrise was at 4:20am and sunset at 11:42pm. However, these numbers do not account for the 90+ minutes of dawn and dusk before and after that. As an added bonus, we challenged the record high temperature for today in Anchorage, a sweltering 78 degrees, with humidity in the 60% range. Horrible really. At least to hear Anchoragites (Anchorageans?) talk about it.

We struggled with how to provide the most complete visual experience of this for you. We decided to take a series of pictures, but to prevent the camera from cheating for us, we took all pictures with a 50mm prime lens with 1/200 exposure time and 4.0 aperture. This was one stop overexposed at 10pm. The pictures are facing east, so the sun is setting behind the camera (as you can see from the 10pm shadow).

In December, we'll take the same series of shots and the brightest one will look like the 11pm, but at 1pm.
10:00
10:30
11:00
11:30
12:00

This one was also taken at 12:00 AM, but with the camera's auto light metering on (it more accurately shows how light it really was):