Aurora Hunting

it has always been something we talked about doing "some day" - chasing the northern lights, so after a friend recommended this company to me, it really wasn't that hard to convince me.

first, some background on the northern lights.

northern lights occur when the sun releases solar flares which collides with the earth's atmosphere. solar flares don't happen all the time, but apparently this autumn and winter is the best time to see it due to something called the solar maximus, which means there is a higher likelihood of solar flares occurring. (or some shit like that)

the further north, the higher chance of seeing the northern lights (duh)

if it is too bright, the northern light can't be seen.
if there are clouds, the northern light can't be seen.


from the 4 conditions, the only 2 within human control is to head as far north as humanly possible, and to look for super dark places.

so the tour agency which specializes in aurora hunting brought us to Luosto.
which is a tiny town in north Finland, with 50 to 200 inhabitants, depending on time of the year.


we had to transfer from Helsinki cos the tiny airport, Rovaniemi, only serves domestic flights, followed by a 1.5 hour car ride further north.

this is how far north we were.

since aurora hunting can only take place after dark, which was around 10pm the few days we were there, we went for some activities during the day.

such as going on a hike with huskies

now, this is really kinda silly, cos there are 2 huskies at home and we hardly ever take them out for walks.
effectively, we've flown for duno how far to walk other people's dogs.

the camping was more fun.

it was like in the movies, cos the guide started a fire with wood (and a lighter, of course) and boiled water with a black kettle so we could all have tea. he then picked up long branches from the ground to act as skewers so we can cook sausages.

her dog was well-behaved. mine was just hyper-active.

after that came the main event, our first expedition to look for the northern lights!
the plan was to climb up a mountain which is around 500m above sea level...

and wait.

to be fair, they didn't tell us hiking meant climbing up rocky mountains, so we didn't quite have the proper footwear

but we've come too far to let inappropriate footwear stop us!

but as fate would have it, even though we made it up (eventually), the elusive northern lights were nowhere to be seen.

next day, the day activity was to visit an actual amethyst mine where we would get to dig for our own lucky amethyst.

here she is, surveying the landscape and choosing where to dig.

and then getting down to work

i dug a really deep hole but didn't find anything. then she was just playing around and found a big 1. mining is stupid.

that night, we went to a secluded location to hear all about the northern lights and to see photos of it.

we thought that if by the end we don't manage to see any for ourselves, we can still tell people we saw the northern lights in finland cos we saw photos of it.

but turned out this talk was what led us to our first (and only) sighting. cos the presenter told us the forecast for an aurora that night was high, and there is a clear sky. so that got us all excited.

and from now on, you are going to be flooded by photos cos i don't know enough words to do the aurora justice.

it was just amazing cos we were both praying so hard that this won't be a wasted trip, and the moment then was very touching.

standing there in the darkness staring up in awe at the lights, it felt like God was putting on a light show just for us. with a shooting star thrown in for good measure! =)



after that day, the weather forecast was that it would rain the next 2 days, and it did. we went ahead on this planned hunt the next (and final) night, but there were so much clouds everywhere it was pointless.

we kept staring at the horizon willing the clouds to be blown away but no such luck.

still, we had fun. she summoned a fireball to keep us warm in the rain.

after raining the entire night, we woke up to find the entire place covered in fog.

the fog was so thick that even the sun was blocked, makes my photos look very artistic.

we had time to spare and the guide very kindly drove us to the real Santa's village!

except that he was out for lunch and we couldn't wait that long.

so we explored his village and found his cosy little corner

and most importantly, we left happy because come Christmas, he knows how to find us.

so that is the last trip of our European adventure.
by far the best trip of them all.


as usual, all the photos have been uploaded to my flickr account, so if you like them, feel free to show some love!!! if you don't critiques are very welcome as well!


btw, i did minimal post-processing work on the aurora photos so that they look as close to what we saw that night as possible.
some of them look a bit different cos of the ISO settings that went haywire at times and i didn't realise it till too late.
i tried to rescue the photos but not sure how to get them to match the rest