Bob, are you serious?

Yep. I applied a bit of Google foo to his name, and was somewhat surprised…

Grrl is still in third place, BTW. Booo!

I haven’t read too deeply about Quark’s expedition, but it will likely be a typical cruise route….which means it will spend quite a bit of time north of the Antarctic Circle – even if it does go south of the circle, the furthest south navigable waters are at about 77 degrees – long way from The South Pole

Bob, are you serious?

To be fair, I do have slightly more interest than most in Grrlscientist winning: she’ll be taking my camera if she wins.

“During Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole, the green ray was observed for 35 minutes, while the sun, rising for the first time at the close of a long polar night, was moving exactly along the horizon.”

So there you go – as long as the atmospheric conditions are right for the green flash and the sun is in the correct position just below the horizon, you may see a prolonged flash at the poles. However, I’d like to point out that the planned expedition will arrive around the middle of the summer when the sun is above the horizon all day. If the sun at least dips low enough around midnight there may be a chance of observing the ray if conditions are good and you can duck behind a nearby object such as a rock (which a number of people have testified to, although such testimony remains rare). Minnaert himself wrote that he could observe the flash for longer if he could run up the incline on a dyke. Anecdotally, the best conditions are at times with very low aerosol loading; I wonder if the flash is observed less frequently in the northern hemisphere now that aerosols are so plentiful that the sky turns whitish rather than simply blue.