The bus picks us up at 10pm for a two hour run to find the Northern Lights. Talk about unpredictable. As we travelled north of Akureyri the bus driver and our guide kept a sharp eye for any shimmering. As it appeared, they would stop the bus and we would all pile out to look up. 40 people with 40 cameras fanning out on the tundra to take pictures. Few had done even a bit of homework on what it took to take a picture of the Northern Lights. An i-phone doesn’t make it, nor does a pocket camera with flash. You need a tripod and a 5-10 second exposure. Even then it was a challenge. I brought a tripod and tried a few different techniques, results were mixed.
Another challenge was the temperature! Probably 10 degrees. 5-6 clothing layers, plus hot tea and chocolate barely got us through the evening. We made three different stops, the second one is pictured. It popped up out of nowhere, lasted just a few minutes then was gone. What is so amazing was to see something so big, move so quickly. These pictures hardly portray what we saw.
You ask, what are the Northern Lights? A good description was on my placemat a breakfast: Northern lights (aurora borealis) are tricky to describe. They look like a skier’s trail in the winter sky, yet they move and quiver. They look self-lit, yet transparent. And just as you spot their pastel colors, they turn back to a glittering white. The scientific explanation,m however, is that auroras result from emissions of photons in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, above 80km, from ionized nitrogen atoms regaining an electron, and oxygen and nitrogen atoms returning to ground state after being excited by a collision of solar wind particles.
We have two more nights in Akureyri, we hope to fine tune our photographs, if, that is, the Northern Lights reappear! Today we have rented a car. Northern Iceland has two roads, we drive one today and the other tomorrow. Got to bed at 2am.
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