Winter Solstice

"December 21st is one of two days when the suns rays will strike one of the two tropical latitude lines. At precisely 12:30am (lcl) or 05:30 (utc) on the 22nd of December the winter solstice begins and we will have absolutely no light from the Sun in Alert. When the sun is 12° below the horizon, this means that the closest spot on Earth that's still bathed in direct sunlight is more than 800 miles away. All the light that you could see has struggled through 800 miles of air and around the curve of Earth's surface. It takes fully 1200 miles of air to fully extinguish the Sun's light and end astronomical twilight.

The Arctic gets just as many hours of sunlight as anywhere else on Earth — in fact, just a tad more. The reason the Arctic is cold is that the Sun never gets very high above the horizon, so its light always hits the ground at an oblique angle. The flip side is that the Sun also never gets very far below the horizon. Most of the time that the Sun's not up in the Arctic, it's skimming just below the horizon and yielding one or another flavour of twilight." (Sometimes invisible to the naked eye)

However, for today and the next few days there is no Astronomical Twilight effecting us here in Alert that means the best star viewing that I have ever seen. So awesome!