Today is the Winter Solstice - the day when the sun is as far south as it gets in it's yearly journey. This is the shortest day of the year and the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The exact time of the Solstice is 4:20 am EST. In (downtown) Grand Rapids, we get 9 hours and 9 seconds of daylight today. Tomorrow, we'll get less than 1 second of additional daylight. By Dec. 311, we gain 3 minutes and 57 seconds of daylight.. The difference in daylight between the Winter Solstice and the Summer Solstice in Grand Rapids is 6 hours and 22 minutes. Today, the sun angle at noon is 24 degrees (above the southern horizon). On the Summer Solstice in June, the sun climbs to 70 degrees above the southern horizon.
Today the sunrise is at 8:11 am. It rises at a 122 degree angle from due north (with due east at 90 degrees). The sunset is at 5:11 pm (rounded up to the next minute) and the sun sets at an angle of 238 degrees from due north (due west is 270 degrees and due south is 180 degrees).
Solar noon today is at 12:41 pm in downtown Gr. Rapids.
Today there is no sun north of the Arctic Circle. This is what the sun is doing around Fairbanks, Alaska, where you need a clear view to the southern horizon to watch the sun climb just 2 degrees above the horizon. At Fairbanks, sunrise is at 10:58 am and sunset at 2:40 pm.
I was in Fairbanks in 2023. It's south of the Arctic Circle, so they do get a sunset in summer, but there is twilight all night long - it never really gets dark.
At Utqiaġvik, Alaska - the northernmost place in Alaska and the U.S., they are north of the Arctic Circle. The sun stays below the horizon (though they do have a few hours of twilight). They won't see a sunrise until January 23rd.
Temperature lags the position of the sun by around a month...so the mid-point of winter temperature-wise is January 20th.
The pic. above is a screen grab from the South Pole. These are the radio telescopes. Here there is daylight for 6 months of the year. Here the sun will stay above the horizon until the Equinox in March.
It may be summer at the South Pole, but the weather doesn't look like summer. Despite some sunshine, the temperature is -20F with a -37F wind chill. The warmest temperature ever at the South Pole was +9.9F on Christmas Day in 2011. The coldest was -117.0F on June 23, 1982. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica (and the world) was an incredible -128.6F at Vostok - a Russian outpost - on July 21, 1983. There was a satellite estimate of a temperature of -135.8F in East Antarctica back in 2010.
Final note:
The pic. above shows mid-level clouds in "cloud streets"