The Famed Dancing Green Lights
Kätkävaara, Finland
September 10, 2018
We drove for an hour to get away from the lights of the small city of Rovaniemi, nestled in the heart of North Finland. The minivan was slowly embraced by pitch-black darkness. Its headlights became the only illumination to the endless stream of coniferous trees. It was 10 p.m. when we reached our destination. As we alight from the vehicle one by one, the cold breeze of the mystical Finnish Lapland welcomed us. I slipped on another layer of thick parka, wrapped a scarf around my neck, and strapped a headlamp to my forehead. It was still weeks before the start of winter but this body-from-the-tropics of mine was already revolting. After forming a nice queue, we headed out for a short hike to the top of a hill. (1/6)
The group was led by Anthony, a British Northern Lights expert, who reassured us that there exists a good chance of seeing what we all came here for tonight. But I already knew that. There are websites that predict the historical probability of Auroras. I chose this night for that specific reason. We were told autumn is the best time to see the Lights, no snow on the ground and on the trees that would reflect back additional light noise to the sky. The moon was also nowhere to be seen. This night had a new moon. No moonlight. All the light on the sky would come from the plain magnificence of the Northern Lights. That was my wish. (2/6)
Even with all these factors leaning in our favor, the key element was still the local weather. And it did not look promising. Ominous clouds seemed anchored to the night sky, as if mocking all my preparation. We reached the hilltop. The peak was full of boulders and the horizon brimming with pines. I sat on the ground and wondered how many times these towering trees had witnessed what would be a once-in-a-lifetime moment for us. (3/6)
We waited. While everyone’s eyes were still darted to the sky for any change in the cloud conditions, Anthony used this time to tell us about the history and the science behind these famous Lights.
Using long-exposure cameras, a blur of green light could already be captured but in the naked eye, the clouds were still obscuring the light show.
It was almost midnight. The weather gradually cleared up. And there it was, before our very eyes, the thing that most of us had travelled halfway around the world for just to get a glimpse of… the Aurora Borealis. Rays of green light projected vertically, dancing like curtains and forming arcs in the sky. What we were staring at was a by-product of the collision of oxygen atoms in the atmosphere with the high-energy solar wind. But during that moment, all the science slipped away from my mind. It was pure awe of the grandiosity of the cosmos that remained. And how fleeting it was. The optical spectacle lasted for a lot less time than we would had wanted, before clouds started to envelop the sky again. (4/6)
We waited once more, hoping for another chance at the sight that seemed to had been etched on our eyes’ retinas. The majesty of the panorama could not be captured fully by any of our sophisticated cameras. Aside from the difficulty of framing the entire sky because there were auroras everywhere we look, I realized experimenting with my camera settings at that moment was futile. Minutes passed by and our luck appeared to had run dry. We walked to a nearby cabin where Anthony had lit a fire and prepared sausages for everybody. I grabbed one, stuck it on a metal rod, and heated it near the fire. After everyone had had their fill, we ended the night with a Finnish New Year tradition of melting horseshoes in the fire, pouring the liquid metal in a bucket of cold water, and making fortune predictions based on the shape of the resulting deformed and re-hardened metal. (5/6)
tl;dr: Seeing the Auroras dance was worth traveling 8,700+ kilometers to the other side of the globe for. (6/6)
