Thursday (23.01.2019) evening my friend Samir and I went to look for northern lights. At first there was an idea of using flashlight in the snowy night environment and have some fun with light painting. But we noticed that the aurora forecast was really good, so we went out into the night of Finnish winter when it’s -29°C, with hopes of seeing and capturing this amazing phenomenon.
But as soon as we headed out promising predictions were corrected and our chances of seeing aurora borealis plummeted. But we went anyway – our initial plan was to take photos of a winter night after all. It was very cold and needless to say – batteries of cameras were dead soon and our fingers and toes froze so much we had to head back home…aurora wasn’t there anyway. Although we wanted to see it so badly, that our minds started to play tricks on us, and we thought we can see it.
When we almost reached home we looked back and there it was – colourful waves of charged particles lighting upper layers of atmosphere! Damn it! We rushed home to warm up, get some extra layers of clothes and charge the dead batteries. After some 20 minutes we went out ready to capture Mother Nature’s light show hoping it would be visible again, but without any luck.
We took more pictures of the night sky, but no northern lights. It was already late, I got some ice on my lens (you can see it in the photo below) and we couldn’t afford to wait another hour, so we packed our things and went home.
Next morning, I looked at the photos again and discovered unusual colour of the sky…we actually got it! But at that moment it was so faint that we didn’t recognise it (the Moon shining bright in the sky wasn’t helping either). I really like this green-blue colour of the night sky. It is so beautiful!
Look carefully at those colours of the sky! There is faint aurora borealis visible!
