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What would it be like to spend six months without a glimpse of the sun? Hi I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.

Winter days are shorter than summer days. The difference is most pronounced at high lattitudes, where the sun does not rise at all for several months during winter.

But the long winter night at high lattitude may provide other opportunities for skywatching, as producer Allan Coukell reports.

The New Zealand base in Antarctica is more than 77 degrees south of the equator ­ that means it doesn't see the sun for almost six months of every year.

Herme Binney spent a winter as a science technician at the Antarctic base.

I was scared of the dark, which sounds like a really dumb thing to be when you're coming down to Antarctica for a year, but after a while it's really kind of comforting. And on moonlit nights you start to see the mountains again, so for a few nights you have your vision back again, and then it disappears. But it's a very odd thing to see a moon circling above your head, that doesn't actually set. It's stranger than the sun circling, I think. The moon circles and never sets.

One good thing about the darkness, says Herme Binney, was that it gave her lots of chances to see the aurora australis ­ the southern counterpart to the Northern Lights.

The auroras are incredible. Auroras are like electromagnetic storms, and sometimes here you might get half a sky full of auroras. I remember one time I was walking home and one ray came up from one side of the hemisphere and another ray came up from the other and they kind of met in the middle. And then it all kind of came pulsing down and then this big curtain shape appeared.

Allan Coukell reports from Auckland, New Zealand. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is underwritten by Subaru. Thanks today to Executive Engineer Sean Doucette.