A village in Norway is seeing the winter sun for the first time thanks to a giant array of mirrors.
Tucked in between steep mountains, Rjukan is normally shrouded in shadow for almost six months a year.
But faint rays have reached it at last via three 183sqft mirrors placed on a mountain.
Cheering families, some on sun loungers, drinking cocktails and waving Norwegian flags, donned sunglasses as the sun crept from behind a cloud to hit the mirrors and reflect down on to the faces of delighted children below.
The plan to illuminate Rjukan was first mooted 100 years ago by the Norwegian industrialist Sam Eyde, who built the town to provide workers for a hydroelectric plant.
The engineer never saw his plan become reality, but his plant and the Telemark town he founded developed a special affection in the Norwegian imagination as the site of the country’s most famous wartime escapade.
Occupied by the Germans during World War II, the factory was a staging post in Hitler’s quest for the atomic bomb. The story of how 12 Norwegian saboteurs parachuted into the nearby tundra and survived freezing temperatures to destroy the factory’s “heavy water” plant inspired a 1965 Hollywood film, The Heroes of Telemark, and is being turned into a 10-part TV series by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. In contrast to the shadow cast over Europe by Hitler’s plan for an atomic weapon, the three mirrors – ironically being remotely controlled from Germany – captured the sunlight and sent it in an ellipse that illuminated about one-third of the square below.
Jan-Anders Dam-Nielsen, director of the Norwegian Industrial Museum, located on the site of the famous factory, said the solar experiment would mark another chapter in the history of Rjukan.
“Soon we will celebrate 70 years since the saboteurs struck the factory,” he said. “Then we will think about how we mark this. This is a really important day in the history of this town.”
Helicoptered in and installed 1,500 feet above the town square, the computer-controlled mirrors, or heliostats, are more commonly used to create solar power in sun-drenched regions of the Middle East.
Here, the solar energy they capture is used to power their tilting trajectory as they follow the sun’s brief dash across the Norwegian winter sky.
The century-old idea was revived in 2005 by Martin Andersen, an artist and resident of the town.