Prudhoe Bay is north of the Arctic Circle. As such, the sun doesn’t set during the summer months.

Me, being crazy, decided to wake up every hour during the night and take a photo from approximately the same place. Maybe not the prettiest place, and it was facing away from the sun because I didn’t want to walk 5 minutes to the lake every hour. But you get the idea.

I took all the photos using the same settings (ISO 100, 1/20th second, f22 on a tripod), and then edited them all exactly the same as well. Then put them all together in a video:

As you can see, the sky only really got dark at 11:30, and that’s because there was a thunderstorm. Which I was standing out in the middle of, with my coat over my camera while my back and legs got soaked. But it was so SO worth it. When I faced away from the sun to take the photo, there was an enormous double rainbow behind our motel building. When I say enormous, I mean I could see an entire half circle, because the land is that flat.

I didn’t have a lens wide enough to take it all in.

And then there was the double fork of lightning that split the rainbow in two. Fucking brilliant. Made me never want to sleep again, because who knows how many fleeting moments like that you miss when you’re getting your shut-eye? I was up for a solid two hours afterwards, buzzing with adrenaline.

Of course, the next night I slept for about 12 hours. Stupid human body.

The last thing about this video – I love how you can see the clouds change hourly. Yeah – this was definitely my favorite part of the trip. An oil field. Who’d have thought?