Direct sunlight hit McMurdo for the first time since April this past week. We live in the shadow of a 13,000 foot volcano, and the low sun finally reached around the flanks of Mt Erebus to spread its light on this little cluster of corrugated tin. We also lost the true night: the sun now contributes some trace illumination all night long. Winfly is a time of ephemeral light: days of long shadows and nights of twilight, when the sun lurks a few degrees below the horizon casting an eerie glow behind the peaks to the south. Every direction I turn, at every hour of the clock, I’m dazzled, and I’m sure I will never see exactly the same delicate astronomical arrangement again.

It has also marked a return to the grind of a six day work week and ten hour days. I’ve gotten soft from short work in temperate climes. Also the food here seems to be even blander: more tureens of bleak carbohydrates and grey meat. We’ve run out of fresh vegetables until October.

But just when the food and the long hours have me down, the universe throws me a bone: the auroras have been extraordinary this past week. Spaceweather.com indicates that we are in the midst of a geomagnetic storm, caused by increased solar flare activity. NASA satellites detected seven X-class flares, the most severe rating in their system, since Sept 7, culminating in one of the most intense days of auroral activity all year on Sept 11. Auroras were photographed in the Northern Hemisphere as far south as Arizona. Here in Antarctica, the night sky begins to look like the parking lot of a fire juggler’s convention.

Hoping not to miss another show, last night I joined a group that included my roommate Ben, and we all hiked to Hut Point for some exquisite viewing.

Ben is a hardened winter-over. He arrived in McMurdo about the same time I did last year. As he’s fond of reminding us, he hasn’t left. It shows. For the entirety of my first conversation with him this season, he stared out over my shoulder. Salvation is near: he’s scheduled to get out on the next flight, in about three weeks, when he will mark a full year in Antarctica.

“Hey Bill?” he said one night after a short span of silence had filled the darkness when the lamp went out in our room.

“Yeah, Ben?” I asked over the divider of cabinets between our beds.

There was a pause and then, as if it had just occurred to him, Ben said, “I’ve been here a year.”

(And just to show how clearly he’s thinking, he’ll be going home to Maine in October—just in time for, yes that’s right, a lovely New England winter).

You’d think living on the least populated continent we’d be free of light pollution. Looking at the globe from space at night, the rim of every other continent is etched with electric light. Antarctica is barely distinguishable from open ocean. Yet there are light bulbs in Antarctica. I provide the training on the supply and maintenance database software here, and according to my query, there are about 3,000 bulbs on station that need regular changing. So there is perhaps one light bulb per 4500 square kilometers on this continent. Unfortunately for aurora viewing, light bulbs are a lot like humans—they tend to bunch up together.

So last night we hiked over the hill seeking darkness. We met other groups of aurora seekers, anonymous in their ECW. “Who’s that?” we called out at each other through crusted-over ski masks. In the lee of the hill, we were mostly out of the sepia glow of McMurdo. We could still hear the distant hum of the power generators, and the mechanical whine of the tractors working round the clock to groom a new runway out on the sea ice. We lay there with our backs upon the frozen ground, peering out of the narrow furry apertures in our parkas at a dazzling twenty-below spray of stars. We pointed out the occasional satellite. In what seemed like no time, I could sense my ass going numb. For all appearances, we might have been laying in the snow near a strip mine operation a few miles off the interstate in the middle of Nevada on a hard January night.

Then a great ghostly form took shape straight above us and began writhing in a sinuous pale green arc. We all watched in silence as it deepened in color and danced like a lithe stream of green cigarette smoke curling into the dark room of the upper atmosphere.

“You know, this place is really a shit hole,” Ben said. “But sometimes it’s worth it.”