Round-the-clock sun rises at Utsjoki

The midnight sun rose on Thursday in Utsjoki, the northernmost municipality of the country, which will not dip down below the horizon until late July.

People of the locality started to witness the “nightless nights”, the time of the year when the sun circles the sky, not setting at all for 10 weeks.

In the south of Utsjoki, in somewhat more densely-populated Sodankylä, the white nights will arrive in about two weeks.

Theoretically, the period of round-the-clock sun in the North is restricted only to regions above the Arctic Circle.

In practice, the refraction of light by the earth’s atmosphere scatters the midnight sun to areas as far as Kemi, around 100km further south, where for at least one day a year the sun seemingly does not set.