Where? Choose a location where you can see the northern sky with an unobstructed view. If there are lights around, make sure they are behind you in the south. During the winter months, there are very few hours of daylight in northern Finland, which makes it an excellent destination for spotting the Northern Lights.
How can I tell they really are the Northern Lights? Social media is full of colourful Northern Lights pictures, but the most common colour is light green, which can be easily confused with clouds. However, Northern Lights move faster and more irregularly than clouds.
How to catch them on camera? You can take photos of the Northern Lights with a camera or with a smartphone. Just remember to adjust the ISO, for example, to 800–1600 and set the shutter speed to several seconds. The modern camera lens sees the Northern Lights better than the human eye, so it is possible to get a photo of the Northern Lights without actually seeing them yourself.
Schools in the Finnish far north operate their own Northern Lights cameras
When astronauts look at the Northern Lights from space, they see green “tails” moving like a snake across the Earth’s magnetic north and south poles.
This kind of image had been missing from Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory’s (SGO’s) data collection, but director Eija Tanskanen had an idea: with Northern Lights cameras around the region, it would be possible to combine pictures taken by them into one image just as vast and comprehensive as the ones taken from space. With the help of this image, we could understand the Northern Lights better.
Today, all 15 high school yards in the eastern and northernmost parts of northern Finland have a special SKY-I automatic time-lapse camera directed at the sky. They observe and capture the Northern Lights and other night-sky phenomena and send the pictures to the SGO.
Pupils follow the cameras on a regular basis, get familiar with the data collected and have the Northern Lights included in their physics studies. To make the picture even more accurate, more SKY-I cameras will be installed in high schools in the western parts of northern Finland, and probably also in high schools in northern Sweden.
By Anna Ruohonen, ThisisFINLAND Magazine
