Northern Lights in Tromso

Lights over Grotfjord

We did two northern lights tours whilst we were in Tromso, well actually three if you include our night dog sledding adventure. But the actual night tours were all about seeing the lights, no distractions, with the dogs you barely had time to look at the sky! The company we went with, I'm not sure if I would recommend them, were all about guaranteeing northern lights viewing, which is good. But it does mean if most of Norway is under cloud then you are driving to Finland, which is a 2 hour drive away. The tour then ends up being 11 hours long, which is not really what I expected. We got to bed at 4:30am!

The frozen lake - not many lights

The thing is we had great light shows within the first 2 hours of the tour, then the next 9 hours are spent driving around, getting colder and colder. Other companies will give you the option of cancelling or rescheduling your tour, if there is very little chance of seeing the northern lights, which I think is a better option than who we went with.

We did learn a lot from this first, arduous, tour though, so we were definitely prepared next time round. The trick is, at the first stop, change your boots, get on their arctic suit, and get some heat packs. The second time round we were also luckier though, in that it was a crystal clear night, so we only had to drive enough to get away from the Tromso lights.

This spot was amazing, and the lights were incredible

I'm not sure what skills you needed to be a northern lights guide, it's not quite what I expected. It seemed more that you had to be unfailingly upbeat, able to withstand immense cold, and good at night photography. When we drove to Finland it was -14 degrees, that was cooooold! And yet our guide seemed to only have 3 layers on. We were all in these incredible Arctic suits that could handle temperatures of -40.

We even got some purple

It kind of made me want to get into night photography, I do need a better lens though. The guide had a camera with a lowest aperture of 1.4, my lowest was 3.5. His pictures were amazing. It's also actually kind of hard to figure out if you are in focus, since it's pitch black, and your photos are not very bright. Thankfully I took a lot of photos, so at least some turned out ok. But that's definitely something for me to figure out, how to tell at night, whether the photo is perfectly in focus.

Can't get enough of this fjord

The lights themselves were amazing, mainly green, though when you see them with the naked eye they look almost colourless. The amazing photos you see are not what you will see with your eyes, they just aren't sensitive enough. We did manage to see some purples and reds though, so that was kind of cool. The lights were really going crazy on the second tour, dancing all over the skies, and coming down in sheets, it was really quite special.

The effect of clouds on the light visibility

The guides did know how to pick some pretty spots, so even if there were no lights, you were going to get some nice landscape photos. The first tour we stopped at this frozen lake. We weren't allowed to wander off though, as they weren't sure how thick the ice was in the middle. We saw some lights there, but you could see the effect of low cloud. As soon as there is low cloud you can't see anything.

Surrounded by mountains

The next tour was to the next island over from Tromso, Kvaloya, we ended up visiting this island 5 times whilst we were in Tromso. This spot was amazing though, right at the end of a fjord, with a little town right at the other end, surrounded by mountains.

Just a great spot