SSS Method

So while my main objective on my northern Scandinavia trip was Svalbard (success!), with the way my travel schedule worked out (flight costs/etc.) I had an extra day in Tromsø in northern Norway and decided to do a “Northern Lights Chase.”

Tromsø is one of the best places in the world to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) due to its location right in the center of the “activity band” of the lights in the Arctic, and this was the start of the season. The problem is, it’s often very cloudy right in town. So they have “chases” where you get in a van and travel all around northern Lapland (Norway, Sweden, Finland) to find a break in the clouds to get a good view.

We started at around 6:30 pm (the guide, me, a Malaysian, and a Brazilian), and started driving north.

While yes, I did “see” the Northern lights, it was incredibly cloudy the whole night, and we didn’t get super clear views or pictures. We went all the way to the Finnish border, sat on the side of the road for a few hours, had some hot soup and bread, and tried to get our cameras to get some pictures for memories.

So my pictures aren’t great. It’s a combination of the cloudy weather and the fact that I’m not experienced at all at night photography or astrophotography. So they’re blurry and not exciting, but proof that yes, I did actually see the Northern Lights.

Below are pictures I thought might be aurora, but were actually moonglow from the clouds, according to my guide.

And that was that. After my next day in Tromsø, I flew back to Stockholm via Helsinki (the capital of Finland) for the start of my business meetings. I really liked flying with Finnair, as their specialty in flight is blueberry juice. Very unique (and refreshing)!

And I’ll leave this trip report with one final bad joke that I saw in Helsinki airport when I accidentally missed the transfer hall and went out to baggage claim (and so had to go through security again, boo). HEL is the airport code for Helsinki airport, and they had this clever sign at baggage claim: