The North Pole, Arctic Ocean
90°N
Click on a link to see an image of the full nighttime sky above you at various dates through the year.
Click on a constellation in the sky chart to see its name. You can also get the name of brighter stars in the same way.
Both time keeping and directions are difficult at the north pole. From the north pole, every direction is south, and the sun does not rise and set, except only by virtue of its apparent annual motion along the ecliptic.
To understand the polar sky charts, imagine that you are almost at the pole. You are only a short distance away from it, along the 0° meridian of longitude. The pole is directly to the north - a mile perhaps. Travelling directly south will take you to Great Britain and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Walking east or west will take you in a circle around the pole.
The times given are the times on the Greenwich meridian, that is, Universal Time. Thus Aug. 5 at 9 PM represents 2100 hours UT on Aug. 5. This corresponds to a sidereal time of approximately 18h.
On half the sky charts the sun is above the horizon. The stars will not be visible on that date. However, the same sky can be viewed on days in the winter half of the year when the sun does not rise. For example, the sky of the May 5 sky chart can be seen on Dec. 20 at approximately 0600 hours UT.
Notice that at the north pole, the celestial equator coincides with the horizon. At any instant you see the entire northern celestial hemisphere above the horizon and nothing of the southern celestial hemisphere.
The photograph shows the Russian Icebreaker YAMAL during the 1994 Arctic Ocean
