I'm almost ready to get the credit card out and book a flight to Norway for this December. I noticed on The Photographer's Ephemeris that there are no details for sunrise and sunset from the 11th of December onwards. This at first, was a little strange to take in, until I realised that the sun does not rise above the horizon and therefore, nor does it set. The place is in perpetual darkness from the 11th of December until the 3rd of January, as you can see here in this screen shot of TPE:

As you can see (click to see a larger view), there are no times for the sun (or the moon for that matter) on the 11th of December. So this means that I need to plan my trip to go a little earlier in December.

Personally, I wish to experience the perpetual darkness, so having perhaps most of the week with some sun, and maybe a few days of perpetual darkness is something to plan for.

But what about the twilight time? I love shooting in twilight and my friends in Lofoten tell me that it never really gets absolutely black, so let's study TPE for twilight:

As you can see (click for larger view), there are recordings for twilight. I'm interested in Civil twilight as that is the twilight where objects are discernible to the eye. You can see that on the 11th, although there is no sun, civil twilight begins at 9:12am and finishes at 14:48 in the afternoon. So I have 5 and a bit hours to shoot in twilight.

So what is actually happening to the sun throughout the day? With civil twilight, the sun is -6º below the horizon, so let's look at TPE's details tab:

You can see that the sun is around -6º below the horizon at 9:11am in the morning, and the sun gets a little higher than that until it starts to dip around 2pm. The yellow part of the curve is the angle of the sun throughout the day. The blue curve is the angle of the moon throughout the day. So if we look at the graph, we can see that the sun never gets above the horizon.

But the good news is that I have around 5 hours of twilight to shoot in. Very worth hanging around for, and not heading off home early, like I initially thought.