When is the best time of year to find the North Pole?

Question

The Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is defined as the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole) There were several attempts to reach the North pole prior to the 1940's. A review of [Wikipedia's article on Exploration of the North_Pole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole#Exploration) indicate some of the difficulties in definitively identifying the location. I imagine the best time is either near summer when the sun can be your best resource or the winter when the stars can be your best resource. But I have no idea which of either of these times would be best. Excluding the use of GPS, and just using tools available to earlier explores what time of year is best to find the North Pole. Ignoring all the difficulties of travel at that time of year, just identifying the location with pre-GPS technology.

Answer 1

The tool that would have been used by early explorers to determine the North Pole is the sextant. Normally, you have to use it to find both latitude and longitude using sun sightings, a watch, and some math equations and/or conversion tables. However if you are already actually at the Pole there is no longitude, only latitude, and so the only thing you're really trying to prove is that you made it to 90 degrees north latitude. As long as you can see the sun clearly and know what time it is in Greenwich, England (GMT), all you have to do is measure how many degrees above the horizon the sun is with your sextant and run that through your tables to determine your latitude (somewhat simplifying here). The North Pole receives 163 days of total darkness and 187 days of midnight sun each year. As long as you can see the sun clearly, any one of those 187 days of sunlight are theoretically just as good as any other to do your sun sights, depending on random cloud cover, snowstorms, etc. Your longest day of sunlight would be June 21st of course, when you would have 24 hours of sunlight to take all the readings you want. If I was an early explorer, I would initially choose to have my expedition to the Pole during the middle third of those 187 sunlit days, and then further refine the dates by looking at the historical weather patterns that had the best weather during that approximately 2-month middle sunlight window. Now this is all in answer to your question of when is the best time to FIND the North Pole. However, if you want to TRAVEL to the North Pole, the height of summer is actually more dangerous then, with lots of melting going on and cracks opening up in the ice. You want sunlight, but you want things still frozen solid, so you would front-load your season, heading out as soon as you could get good sun sights, but still cold and iced over enough. That would be in March or April. And lo and behold Robert Peary. who claimed to make it to the Pole first, claimed he did so on April 9th, 1909. As to whether or not he actually made it there, they are still arguing about, but that's a whole different story....