It’s funny that with arctic locations, the peak season for visitors is generally the middle of summer. While I accept that midsummer in these cold parts of the globe is crazy good fun due to parties, saunas and the general excitement of the local people who become set free from the extreme climate that traps them for most of the year, I never really understood why you would visit a cold, icy, mountainous part of the world and then try to avoid the cold, ice and mountains. Sure, in the colder months the north is dark and forboding and the extremely good looking inhabitants are obscured by excessive clothing. But on the plus side, you experience life as it is most of the year in these parts…. and you “might” even get to see the Northern Lights.
The first time I ever went to Norway, I visited my friends Maria and Todd in a town called Bodø above the arctic circle. It was January 2002 and the middle of winter. As such, and being so far north, there were 24 hours of darkness. Well, this is actually not quite correct. For about 3 or 4 hours of the day, there is a sort of twilight which allows you to see around you for a while, and then it gets really dark again. In fact, while I was there I didn’t see the sun at all for 3 weeks. My body clock got completely out of whack. I would wake thinking it was still the middle of the night, and find that it was 12 midday. And then my body would either want to fall asleep at 4 pm or not at all. On the plus side, it was extremely good conditions for viewing Northern Lights.
Except, that is rained nearly the whole time I was there. On the clear nights, we would drive up a nearby mountain for a good view, only to find that there was no aurora activity. After a few weeks of this, I decided that it was time to bail south and my mode of transport was to be the Hurtigruten ferry. On the way out to the dock at 3 am, I was completely stoked when the Aurora Borealis appeared suddenly as a big green curtain in front of us. On board the ship, I watched from the outdoor deck on my own as the lights faded and we started the trip south.
I had to wait 2 years to see the Northern Lights again, this time above the arctic circle in Finland in 2004. The weather here had been truly unbelievable, 7 days of the clearest driest weather ever with the temps starting to reach the early pluses. So I had been doing some serious Aurora hunting! My travelling companion Outi and I visited Outi’s cousin Kaarina in a beautiful city called Oulu which is about halfway up the length of finland, maybe 100km from the arctic circle. Leaving the house on Saturday night I was watching a plane leave a vapour trail across the full moon as if to scar the night right down the middle. Suddenly the sky lit up with Northern Lights, a huge green and red curtain which grew to fill the entire sky! I never had any idea something could be so beautiful. At one point a huge lilac flower opened above us as if summoning us to heaven. With the full moon and stars and everything else! Needless to say I annoyed Outi and everyone else by staying out half the night to watch for the aurora. We went to visit Outi’s grandma, seriously out in the sticks, in a beautiful place called Juorkuna. Apart from the full moon, it was seriously dark there due to no streetlights or city lights and with incredible clear weather so the scene was set. Unfortunately despite depriving myself of sleep and getting a sore neck from looking up and a cold back from lying in the snow I didn’t see much lights, only on the last night when a pretty green curtain lit up the frozen lake.
We then went to Inari again. This is way up in Lapland, wild frontier country. This is the quirky town where we met Pistol Packing Neo Nazi Homosexual Bikie Pete in 2003. Luckily we didn’t see him again- a good thing lest he remembered my failure to accept his invitation of a sauna in his summer cottage and jam donut he offered me, and then let his knuckledusters do the talking. Well, anyway, what a surprise to hop off the bus arriving in Inari and have Northern lights in a beautiful rainbow formation above us… another sleepless night.
The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights forms in a region around the north pole while the Aurora Australia, the Southern Lights, form in a region around the south pole. Since there is less landmass and less habitation in the region in the southern hemisphere, most people that view the aurora do so in the north. Charged particles radiating from the sun travel at high velocities towards the earth and are accelerated towards the poles by the earth’s magnetic field. They then collide with oxygen or nitrogen atoms in the earth’s atmosphere, exciting or ionising these atoms. When the atoms return to their ground state, the excess energy is released by the emission of a photon of light. The colours of emitted light depend on the atom excited, and the excitation energy of the electron transition.
- Green – oxygen, up to 240 km in altitude
- Red – oxygen, above 240 km in altitude
- Blue – nitrogen, up to 100 km in altitude
- Purple/violet – nitrogen, above 100 km in altitude