The sun rose today, cold and low. Far to the south, it broke the horizon, revealing just its upper edge, and within an hour it had set again. As I write, it’s the thirteen of November, and the sun won’t be back until the twenty-eighth of January.

In some ways, the sun had already abandoned this part of the world, and in other ways, its departure won’t be felt for some time. The sun has not strayed far from the horizon for this last month: fleeting, attenuated by low clouds, its rays offering scarce comfort to exposed skin. Yet, today we have six and a half hours of civil twilight: good working light, fine for shooting a deer or driving without headlights. And we’ll have some midday twilight through most of the winter. It’ll be weeks before the stars and aurora become visible at noon.

After several days of strong winds that kept us holed up inside, we emerged on this final day of sunlight to find calm winds and patches of open sky. We worked outside through the day, shoveling entryways out from the storm-blown snow and tackling delayed tasks. Just after sunset, I headed out with my kite and took a few aerial photos. The first shows the heart of camp in motion: Marie in the Cat 953 track loader pushing snow away from the garage bay door; Kevin’s work revealed in the reliable column of exhaust rising from the thundering generator in the shop; Nate on foot with a GPS backpack, mapping the ever-changed snow surface height. The second shows the Mobile Science Facility, a cloud-and-radiation research lab that I look after, with its web of bamboo-supported cables extending across the ice to outlying instruments. And on the horizon, a spectacle of light, the first colors we’ve seen in the sky for days, and the last of the sun we’ll see for months.