Imagine getting only 360 seconds of sunshine in a whole month -- sounds pretty depressing? Moscow had its darkest December on record in 2017, getting just six minutes of sunshine, media reports said.
Temperatures in parts of the Siberian region of Yakutia dropped to minus 67 degrees Celsius, prompting even eyelashes to freeze, a CNN report said on Thursday.
Residents of the remote region, about 3,300 miles east of Moscow, were certainly accustomed to record-cold weather, but the selfie posted by Anastasia Gruzdeva taken on Sunday in the city of Yakutsk shocked many.
The BBC report said early in December, late in the day, when Oleg Boldyrev, a reporter, looked up to the sky, he was startled "to find a thin golden, circular wedge of something other-worldly hung well above the roofs of central Moscow".
"I Googled it -- my hunch was confirmed. I saw a crescent Moon.
But when I looked up again the clouds had engulfed it. I haven't seen the Moon since," Boldyrev said.
Roman Vilfand, head of the Russian meteorological service, confirmed in December Muscovites were deprived of clear skies more than ever.
The darkest month of the year became the gloomiest ever observed -- only six minutes of open sunlight was registered, well down from the previous low of three hours in December 2000, the BBC report said.
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