Christmas Day Aurora Sighting In Reykjavík

These aren't really the best photos of the Aurora but they'll probably always be our favorites for a couple of reasons. First, they were the first! It was December 25th around 7pm (19:00) and we were walking to dinner when, BLAM, to our right, in the middle of downtown we saw this great band appear! The second reason I love these shots is because they were the only time we really saw clear and vibrant purple in the lights. For our two week trip, we saw the lights on six nights and this was the only real multicolored event. The different colors of the lights come from different gasses being stirred into varying excited and ionized states. Green, the most common color, is produced when oxygen is excited. Other colors appear when solar radiation is hitting the earth strong enough to excite other gasses like nitrogen for purple!

Aurora Sighting In Egilsstaðir

This northern lights session was shot while staying in these great tiny cabins in Egilsstaðir. The forecast for the night, which you can get at vedur.is, said the night would be bad for aurora due to high clouds but on this night we were pleasantly surprised. A note about weather forecasts in Iceland: Iceland has notoriously unpredictable and extreme weather; in our experience cloud cover predictions were generally right except for the timing. Fast and slow winds would often bring expected cloud systems far ahead or behind of schedule. We got lucky on this night with some great lights above our cabins for about four hours off and on, varying in strength until about three AM or 0300 (Iceland mostly runs on 24 hours clocks). If you look to the bottom left there's a red-orange glow; that's actually from the lava fields, which are active right now!