this christmas, we visited ivalo in finnish lapland. we had plenty of snow, it was freezing cold (between -13 and -30 degrees celsius), and the sky was often clear – perfect conditions for auroras!
during daytime, short as it was, we did an excursion to the siida museum in inari, to saariselkä, and via utsjoki to norway.
finally, here are some aurora animations:
one reason why i like the north so much are northern lights: aurora borealis. lappland is a good place to see them, as is northern canada. thanks to the cloud cover, i missed several great auroras (judging from shots people did in this area during these days), but i still saw something. the first set of aurorae appeared when i was outside of guesthouse husky, during one night:
while visiting inari with some other guests staying at the guesthouse, we met andy keen, an aurora hunter and photographer. he gave us a lift back to ivalo, and told us a bit about his history and his fascination on auroras. well, two days later, one other guest and me went on an aurora hunting trip with andy. unfortunatley, we weren’t lucky enough to get a full-blown aurora. but we still saw something, at least! for that, andy drove us somewhere north of inari, near to a lake, where we had a great view over the lake in the direction of norway. the moon was shining bright, and without the stars it almost seemed like daylight. (i guess without the moon the aurorae would have looked more intense as well…) here are some impressions from the lake:
we later continued to another very nice spot, of which i already showed two photos here, and on the way back we stopped on a bridge where we got another wonderful view. (the last four photos of the previous post show these locations.) unfortunatley, both times without auroras. but that’s the problem of aurora hunting, you’re depending a lot on luck. (according to murphy’s law, there probably was a wonderful intense aurora as soon as we were in bed ;-) )
if you’re ever around this area and want to see auroras, do not have a car (to escape the clouds) or just don’t know what to look for, ask andy. he’s a nice guy :-) and it’s nice to be able to start dozing off while someone drives you home in the middle of the night…
the last five days i’ve been spending at lake inari, near to ivalo, as you might have already seen. unfortunately, it was cloudy most of the time. but most of the time it was dry, and never too cold. (i never wore a jacket.) the area is just beautiful, especially if it is so colorful during ruska.
if you’re interested in staying there, here is the mökki’s booking page. this one has tap water, though it contains a lot of iron and many people do not like the taste. (i didn’t mind it too much, though.) the sauna is wood-driven, as in the first mökki.
today, i heard about, downloaded and watched valkaama, a movie released under one of the creative commons licenses. (this means that you can actually download the sources of the movie and make your own version. and, probably more important to most people, you can just copy and watch it without restrictions.) technically speaking, the movie is of good quality, except the audio, maybe. i’ve listened to the movie with headphones, which was a bit annoying since voices were often only audible on the left or the right channel, but almost never somewhere inbetween. on speakers, this is fine, but with headphones it sucks. but besides that, everything’s great. so go and watch it, but maybe not with headphones :-) the movie also features inarijärvi, one of the largest european lakes, located in northern lapland.
