Northern lights.

Stacey and I visited Iceland a few years ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a stunningly beautiful country (assuming you like mountains, waterfalls, and beaches). And it’s a relatively easy trip — it’s only six hours or so by plane from the States.

The one thing we really wanted to see that we missed last time we visited was the northern lights. So when we visited Iceland a second time (this time bringing our friend Kelly along), that was our big bucket list item.

We were not expecting to see a volcano. So seeing that like an hour after we landed was pretty amazing.

The thing about the northern lights (and most other astronomical phenomena), is they’re hard to see from the city. Cities usually produce some amount of light pollution, and that makes it tough to see anything but the brightest objects in the night sky. To improve our chances of seeing the lights, we booked a tour with some local Icelandic guys who take you out of town in a van to good (i.e. very dark) viewing locations.

The other thing about the northern lights is that they come and go. You can read up on exactly why, but it has to do with solar activity which varies day to day and hour to hour. So our first night of northern lights seeking was a bust. Our tour guides did their best, and the weather was clear, but the lights just didn’t want to cooperate.

A couple of nights later, on our last night in Iceland, we heard (via a few northern lights tracking apps and websites) that the lights were on for the evening. So Stacey, Kelly, and I hopped in our rental vehicle and drove to a popular northern lights viewing spot about fifteen minutes from downtown Reykjavik. 

There were a bunch of other people already there, and more coming in behind us. It kind of reminded me of all the folks getting together hoping to see flying saucers in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Sure enough, after our eyes started adjusting, we were able to see some northern lights. Even away from the city, the lights were subtle. They almost look like wispy clouds. They’re more colorful than clouds, but my ability to discern subtle colors in low-light situations is not what it used to be. (There are plenty of annoying things about getting older, and declining eyesight is definitely one of them.)

Thankfully we have technology to help us. We were able to get some pretty cool photos of the northern lights with our iPhones. Now that I’ve seen them once, I’d love to try to photograph them with a proper camera on a tripod (long exposures do a lot to improve the visibility of the lights). And it’d be great to see them from somewhere way out in the middle of nowhere, with near-zero light pollution. But I’m really glad the northern lights came out for us before we had to head back home to the States.

(The northern lights can be different colors. We saw mostly green and red. But the northern lights can be other colors, too.)