Chasing the northern lights
One night. Three things had to align. We had no control over any of them.
After catching the midnight sun in Iceland, this trip had only one purpose. The northern lights.
I had read everything about the aurora before the trip. Knew it was a gamble. Three things have to align: clear skies, solar activity, and luck. You can control none. The guide can control none. Everyone is at the mercy of the same sky.
What I wasn’t prepared for was operating a camera in manual mode at minus 15, with gloves on, in the dark, while something extraordinary was happening above my head.
Here’s how the night went.
The wait
We drove out of Tromso at 6pm. A coach of hopeful strangers who had all come very far to look at the sky. It was snowing heavily in the city. The plan was to get away from the city lights and find a clear patch of sky. The plan depended entirely on the sky cooperating.
It didn’t. Not at first.
We stopped at a campfire somewhere outside the city. Hot soup, reindeer skins on foldable chairs, Viking myths about the aurora from the guide, who was also, the whole time, refreshing forecast apps and texting other guides on WhatsApp. The myths and the meteorology, running in parallel.
We waited an hour. The sky stayed shut.
First signs
Then, faintly, something.
Barely visible to the naked eye. A smear of greenish-grey low on the horizon that might have been the lights or might have been nothing.
Gloves off. Fingers freeze immediately. Tripod won’t cooperate. Camera in manual mode, settings I had practised many times, suddenly harder to remember. The aurora is right there and I am fumbling.
The shots came out like this. Out of focus, shaky, nothing like what my eyes were seeing. I stood there looking at the screen and felt a very specific kind of frustration that only photographers will understand.
The lights grew slowly, then more. We watched with naked eyes for a while, which was the right call. Some things you should see before you try to photograph them. I managed one shot of us standing under it.
Then, just like that, it was gone.
The guide looked at his phone. Looked at the sky. Said that’s it. Time to pack up. Not our night.
The cost of disappointment
Disappointed. Frustrated. Frozen, literally.
We had come a long way for this. And what we had was one brief window, a sky that showed up for ten minutes and then closed. I thought about all the photos I had seen on online before the trip. The ones that effortlessly set the whole sky with perfect curtains of green.
Sitting alone in the dark, quietly calculating the cost of this disappointment.
We got back in the bus. Nobody said much. The guide, to his credit, tried. He told us stories of groups who had come back three nights in a row and seen nothing. People who had spent two weeks in Tromso or travelled to Finland border and gone home empty. It helped, slightly. I stared out the window at the dark anyway.
The call
About twenty minutes into the drive back, his phone rang.
He has a network of around 100+ aurora chasers across the region. People who call each other when they see something.
He said nothing. Just put his foot down on the pedal. Eyes alternating between the road and the sky more than what was probably safe. Pulled into a random parking space off the main road and got out.
We got out.
First sign. Faint green above us.
Something’s coming
The sky to the north had a faint green tinge where there hadn’t been one before. The guide looked up and said: get ready. Something’s coming.
Second sign. Stronger now. The green unmistakable.
The snow started to reflect it. The whole landscape around us shifted colour, going teal, going green, the white ground lit from above by something that had no business being that colour.
Snow reflecting green. The landscape transformed.
And then it happened.
Not just lights. Movement. The aurora wasn’t sitting still in the sky, it was dancing. Ribbons of green folding and unfolding. Waves rolling across the sky from one horizon to the other. Then an explosion of it, pink and white folding into the green, the whole sky doing something I had no words for.
Standing under it
I’ve never felt that mix before. Excitement, disbelief, and calm, all at the same time.
This was a childhood dream I had filed somewhere quiet. Standing under it, I felt like a tiny speck. Carl Sagan spent his life trying to put that feeling into words. Standing there, I finally understood why he bothered.
It’s not just the green. It’s the scale. The movement. The silence.
We stood there until it faded.
The sky kept its promise
We came a long way for this. A lot of cold, a lot of waiting, a lot of refreshing apps that kept saying maybe.
Standing in that parking space off a road I couldn’t name, watching the sky do that, I stopped thinking about any of it.
Worth it isn’t the right phrase. It just was. And now it’s something I saw, which is different from something I wanted to see.
And then, on the flight home, we looked out the window.
