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Look around. You can use your mouse or your arrow keys to explore the view. The shift key will zoom into the view and the control key will zoom out.
If you saw anything looking out of our observation dome you were very lucky. The weather here at the North Pole is peculiar; we are often fog or storm bound and you won't see anything out the window. The storms here are terrible and last for weeks. Some times you will come up here in midsummer, and the only thing visible out the window is white, or the whole building will be shaking because of the wind. Once in a while,we get good weather and the place is beautiful.
On the other hand if you saw controls for a movie player then you are probably running M$ Internet Explorer and it thinks it knows how to play Quicktime movies -- which it doesn't play properly. To get the window working right install the QuickTime movie player plugin from Apple, it is free from here. Apple supports several other browsers, including Netscape and Mozilla, however some operating systems and some browsers may not have the required plug-in -- sorry.
Note that day and night and the seasons are pretty abnormal here. The sun never gets higher than 23.5 degrees above the horizon. So even in late June, when the sun is the highest, most people feel it is like mid to late afternoon. Of course, this "mid-afternoon" lasts 24 hours because every day the sun makes a complete circle around us, and doesn't appear to get any higher or lower. Here, for you to see, is a couple of June views.
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As fall comes we have the longest sunset anywhere (expect maybe for the south pole in late March). Depending on how you count it, sunset lasts for 1 to 2 months as the sun slowly spirals out of sight. Here is postcard we sell in the museum bookstore of a moment in late September with a splendid instant in our extended sunset.
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After the sun slowly departs we are left with about 4 months of darkness. Here is a view from midwinter with a moon just on the horizon. The moon can rise higher in the sky than the sun can, and when the weather cooperates it provides an amazing amount of light.
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Spring like fall consists of 1 to 2 months of a sun slowly spiraling upward. It is mostly cold, and awful here, very cold and very awful -- all year around.
PS The view from the observation dome uses the QuickTime player plug-in, which must be installed in your browser.
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