A very cold field trip

My astronomy professor last spring spent a good portion of class one day telling us about his trip to Svalbard a few years back. Apparently the territory of Norway is not only the site of Norway's seed bank (though I doubt that's why he was there), it's also a very good place for astronomy observation, though a very cold place for it. I believe he was there over the summer solstice, so he would have been there for the 24-hour daylight, and he said that the high latitude (700 miles from the North Pole, after all) made it so the change in daylight hours each day was a lot more drastic than it is here (12 minutes or so per day versus one or two here in the Northeast).

I'm not exactly in the market for a similar trip (mostly due to the school and money thing), but Discover Magazine is sponsoring a trip to Svalbard for the total solar eclipse in March 2015. The path of this particular eclipse will pass right over Svalbard, so people would be able to see the eclipse for almost two and a half minutes; as a comparison, the site of the greatest total eclipse, near the Faroe Islands, would see it for 2 minutes and 47 seconds, so this is pretty close.

Picture from NASA on Wikimedia Commons by public domain

The trip would start and end in Oslo, and during the four-night stint in Longyearbyen, it would include adventures in dog sledding, glacial spelunking, aurora sighting, or just exploring the island in addition to the eclipse on March 20. Each day would also have an education session about the flora, fauna, geology, and more on the island. Prices sit around $6000 for the week-long trip, but considering what you're getting, it sounds like a pretty neat opportunity.