This is pretty cool. Ever thought about what the equinox means at the South Pole?

This comes from spaceweather.com:

SUNRISE AT THE SOUTH POLE: On Sept. 21st, Ethan Dicks looked out the window of his office and saw the sun for the first time in 6 months. He quickly grabbed his camera and snapped this picture of sunrise at the South Pole.

"I am a researcher for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, running IceCube, the large (1 km3 when completed) neutrino telescope that's under construction a mile below the ice near the South Pole," explains Dicks. "The past six months have been almost nothing but night; it's good to see the sun again."

He took the picture a full day before the Sept. 22nd equinox--the "official" date of sunrise. Geometrically, the sun should've been mostly below the horizon at the time, but refraction by the dense polar atmosphere lifted the image up for all to see.

"Polar regions are famous for mirages and early explorers sometimes wondered what was real and what illusion," notes atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "In Dicks' picture, several air layers of different temperature have distorted and sliced the sun. Its rays are bent as they pass between the layers to form multiple images, some inverted and some upright."

Dicks is a veteran observer of South Pole sunrises. "This is my third winter here," he says. Some sunrises are heralded weeks ahead of time by a diffuse glow on one side of the sky and the retreating shadow of Earth ("a dark blue band topped by a fringe of magenta") on the other. Eventually a sliver of sun appears, circling the horizon for days, growing in size, until finally the sun emerges in full. "When it's clear, the show is amazing. This year, we were mostly clouded out until Sept. 21st. I feel bad for folks on their first and maybe only winter-over; they missed the full sunrise."

When you're at the South Pole, though, even a fraction of sunrise can be a wonderous thing.