The Northern Lights in Iceland!
While Iceland is a beautiful country to visit any time of the year, it is REALLY cold in the winter. Even though the temperatures weren’t too terrible — the lowest we saw was low teens — it’s very windy, so the cold is biting. Plus, most of the coolest things are outside so you’re exposed to the elements when you’re sightseeing.
Visiting in the summer is probably the best experience, save one thing: you can’t see the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. The best months to spot the Aurora are October-February, with the general peak in December because it’s the darkest.
The Aurora Borealis is formed when charged particles escape from the sun after a solar storm and make their way into the outer parts of our atmosphere. They tend to make contact with the atmosphere in bands in the polar region.
The best Aurora conditions are dark and clear skies, with a new moon (extra dark) and no clouds. Plus, of course, you need the sun to cooperate with it’s solar wind storms. The Aurora was inactive on Friday night, there were too many clouds on Saturday (our tour didn’t even go), and we were expecting the snow storms on Sunday to be too cloudy as well. But, the tour decided to go out and I’m glad Charlie convinced me we should go along, because we saw them!
At first, the Aurora was only visible through the camera, set at an ISO of 1800 and a shutter speed of 13 seconds. Then, once we knew where to look, we started seeing the faint outlines of green in the sky. The camera still captured the scene much more brightly than our eyes could see.
We saw this display of the Aurora at Kerið crater, where we had been during the day just a few days before. It’s up above the town below, so there’s a good vista for which to search for the Northern Lights.
After we stayed at Kerið for about 2 hours, the busses left and made a pit stop on the way home for a bathroom break. Charlie and I were sitting on the bus, going through the photos on my camera when suddenly we realized that no one was on the bus. We looked out the window to see dozens of cameras pointed sky-ward, and a faint green tinge above. They were back and we nearly missed them! We dashed out of the bus to snap more photos, but I didn’t have time to focus the camera so they’re not great.
I do wish that the skies were clearer so we could see the real movement of the Aurora, because the clouds kept rolling over the bands making their own movement hard to see. However, we were lucky to have seen them twice on a non-ideal night, and perhaps some day we’ll be lucky enough to see them even more brightly!
