Chasing Daylight

Daylight is the one thing every travel day has in common, and we never once thought to measure it. So we went back and did: for all 1,579 days of this journey we recomputed the sun from the day's coordinates — 19,779 hours of daylight so far, an average of twelve and a half a day.

The shape of it is a river of light. It pinches shut in Tromsø, where for three December days the sun never rose and noon was five hours of blue twilight. It floods at 90° North, where this month the sun stopped setting altogether — seven days of midnight sun and counting, including a marathon run on the sea ice at 07:30 under exactly the same light as midnight.

In between: twenty-two equator crossings, a 206-day streak of twelve-hour days, two noons where our shadows hid directly beneath us, and 88,945 photographs each stamped with the sun's exact altitude at the moment the shutter went — 8% of them in golden light, with seven sunsets for every sunrise.

This page recomputes itself from our daily track on every publish. The river grows one column of light per day for as long as we keep moving.