Sunset '15 (Part 1)

There was a "sun puppy" (it's not actually called that but it was a little sun dog)! You can see it in the picture above on the right side, a sight rainbow in the clouds near the horizon, the rainbow spot had faded a bit by the time I got my camera.

 It was a pretty cloudy day, so not great for seeing the sunset but awesome for the clouds.

 The clouds are just awesome! We are supposed to get a big wind storm tomorrow with up to 30 knots winds, hopefully it blows over quickly and doesn't kick up a ground layer of ice crystals that obscures the horizon for the next week of sunset.

The sun did eventually come out!

This one has a polie (people who live at the pole are called polies) in it for scale! 

Because our sunset is so slow, the "green flash" can actually last hours. We can even see a "blue flash" because its so slow and the air is so clean. The green flash happens because of the refraction of the sun's light through the atmosphere. The green waves of light are a bit longer and can reach just a tiny bit further when they are bent around the horizon. The blue wave lengths are even longer than the green and usually get filtered out by particles in the air under normal circumstances. But since the south pole has the cleanest air in the world if you are standing at the right elevation at the right time it's possible to see the blue light waves from the sun for a few hours, of course weather permitting.

Fun fact: because of the way the image of the sun refracts through the atmosphere the sun is actually already below the horizon. When we see the sun sinking at the horizon it is already gone, what you are seeing is the image of the sun that has been bent by the atmosphere to reach your location. You can see this atmospheric distortion when the sun appears to be funny shaped near the horizon.