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 following photos were taking during night. some of them look like taken at daylight, wouldn’t there be stars at the sky… especially with full moon, the snowscape is just so bright.
the photos in the second row show the guesthouse husky, and the left photo in the third row is from näverniemi lomakylä. the last two rows are somewhere north of inari, the other rows are near to the guesthouse and/or the lomakylä.
the following photos show the winterish lappland in its full beauty. the first two photos show part of the näverniemi lomakylä.
essentially all photos have been taken on the second and the eighth of january.
how is lappland in winter? how is polar night? something i had to find out, and so i was here for almost two weeks, staying in ivalo, a village in northern lappland which is now somewhat familiar to me.
the first three days i was staying at näverniemi lomakylä, and the rest of the time at guesthouse husky. two wonderful places!
i was somewhat lucky and unlucky. lucky in the sense that usually, it is much colder here, around -15 to -25 degrees; i mostly had -5 to -15. not that -25 scares me, having lived for two years in calgary. but doing a nice walk at -15 is just much nicer than at -25… :-) i was unlucky in the sense that most of the time, it was overcast. only very few days lacked the dense cloud cover which is painting the snowscape in grey. still, a beautiful grey! the first set of photos i want to present you is from the overcast daytime, and mostly looks like black and white, or blue and white. the truth is somewhere inbetween, as the light here is quite bluish.
i also did a husky tour on one of the greyish days, as you can see below.
here’s my project 52 shot for the thirtysixth week. the topic was
a quite obvious choice for this topic was something from a certain night near ivalo in the finnish lappland. the scenery was so beautiful, just so fantastically, with the fog creeping around, at low level, not too dense, while the mostly clear sky depicted auroras. this shot has no aurora – i already used that here – but fits in my opinion even better to this week’s topic. i enhanced the colors a bit in gimp. please click the photo to get a larger version:
technical details: 25s, f/8, 50mm, iso 3200. modified using gimp.
here’s my project 52 shot for the twentyfirst week. the topic was
this one wasn’t too hard. instead of photographing chocolate, alcohol, computers, cats, i chose something making me go outside several times a night during the last days: northern lights, also called aurora borealis. these ones i photographed next to my mökki near ivalo, lappland. please click the photo to get a larger version:
technical details: 2s, f/4.5, 16mm fisheye, iso 3200.
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.
while staying near to ivalo, the first night was really, really beautiful. some kind of fog, illuminated by the full moon, and aurorae dancing on the sky. just incredible.
more (daylight) photos will follow later. and in case you didn’t notice, i updated part two and added a few more photos from the trip from kuusamo to ivalo.
today, i drove from anttola/mikkeli up to kuusamo. the views i got reminded me a lot of the yukon. this time of autumn where everything is so colorful is called ruska; i hope i’ll also experience that while staying near to ivalo.
this night there is a solar storm going on (as one can watch right now here), resulting in probable aurora sightenings. unfortunatley, there are clouds on the sky… but maybe i’m more lucky during the next days?
here are a few more impressions from the next day, when i continued to ivalo:
