New Zealand millennium dawn for their eyes only

The first available live footage of the new millennium dawn will instead come from Rangaika, a farm on Chatham Island, and that should happen about 90 seconds after the Pitt Island dawn.

Scientists had established that the crest of Hakepa Hill on Pitt, an outlying member of the Chatham Islands group to the east of New Zealand, would have been the perfect spot to see the dawn just before 5:45 am local Time (21.39 IST, December 31).

Still, the millennium office said delayed Pitt Island broadcasts would be a highlight of domestic and international media coverage of the new year.

“We’re delighted there’ll be live coverage from the (main) Chathams. And the Pitt Island broadcast, while delayed, will still be a key component of the domestic and international broadcasts,” spokeswoman Wendy Pannett said.

The millennium office in August agreed to pay Pitt landowners 104,000 dollars to facilitate the live broadcast. It was part of a 4.5 million NZ Dollars investment aimed to promote New Zealand as a tourism destination under a “first to the future” slogan.

Pannett also shrugged off 11th hour plans by other media to broadcast a first dawn event from a usually uninhabited Atoll in the far east of the Kiribati islands, in the central Pacific.

“New Zealand is officially the first inhabited land to welcome the dawn,” she said. Television viewers around the world will be able to see a live January 1 daylight broadcast five hours earlier than the Chatham islands’ sunrise when Reuters television news links with scientists in Antarctica at midnight there (16.30 IST).

Because of the high latitude the sun does not set during the polar summer, so research bases on the frozen continent are bathed in 24-hour daylight.

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