Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

Last night skies cleared up just in time for a beautiful aurora show. We were getting a bit bored of taking photos from the same jetty every time 😉 so we decided to drive to Håkøya, a small island (reachable by bridge) which is only a 25 minutes drive. Eelke and Roy decided to join us too 🙂 The northern lights were bright and active in all directions when we just got there, and as a bonus they were also reflected in the fjord – beautiful!

After a while they weakened, but we kept taking photos on the beach where they were reflected in all the pools of water. The tide was coming up fast though, if you weren’t careful suddenly your tripod was standing in the water 😀

We stayed out until 01:30, chatting and drinking hot chocolate. There wasn’t much activity anymore, so we decided to go home. Looks like we should have stayed a little longer, as a while later some red aurora showed up. Oh well, you can’t have everything and it’s also good to catch some sleep. I’m sure there’s more to come 🙂

On Monday evening I was tired after a busy day, and I was about to go to bed… I knew the aurora was active but it was too cloudy, still I took one last look at the webcam located in the next valley. I noticed it had cleared up and there was RED aurora… something I have only seen once before, and that was in the Netherlands. A big auroral storm was happening, and I couldn’t stay at home! Thanks to Facebook, we also got Eelke and Roy to join us 😀 It was an incredible show! The northern lights were seen all over Norway that night, much further south than they normally do. The sky was filled with pulsating northern lights, and at times we could see deep red colours. We also saw the corona overhead, very impressive.

We stayed out until 2:30 in the morning… and I only went to bed reluctantly. The lights were active through the rest of the night, until dawn! What a night 🙂

It’s been nearly 4 weeks since I last posted, and time has flown by so fast! We’ve been to Mallorca for a week, a weekend trip to Altevatn near the border with Sweden, and I just got back from 2 days on Svalbard… Today is the first day I get to spend at home, sorting and editing photos 🙂

I’ll start with the most recent photos, taken last Thursday night. We had a Dutch meteorologist and his friend over for dinner, they were visiting Tromsø to see the northern lights. The northern lights have been very active lately, and they already got to see it 3 times during their visit. This was the evening before they were flying home, and when the aurora came out they were keen to use this last opportunity 🙂 So we headed to Telegrafbukta with a thermos of hot chocolate and watched the show. It was partly cloudy, but it was a great show! A few planes flew through our photos, on their way to landing at Tromsø airport which is quite close.

There was no wind and it didn’t feel very cold, nice way to watch the northern lights 🙂 While editing my photos, I found that I also caught a satellite flare (in the last photo below).

If the aurora season continues this way, I won’t get much sleep this winter 😀 Luckily this time the lights died out just after 22:00, so we went home relatively early.