Many people think that in Europe, it is only possible to see Aurora, aka the northern lights, deep in winter, and north of the Arctic Circle. However, under the right conditions, this is not necessarily true. I show you here that yes, you can see Aurora in south Finland for example.
Check the Aurora forecast
First, and it goes without saying, you need to have a clear sky at night, especially towards the north of the sky. There must also be strong enough solar wind and magnetic conditions to allow Aurora to develop further south than its usual latitudes. The easiest way to find out the short term forecast is to look at the website of the Geophysical Institute of the University of Fairbanks Alaska.
That day, I was really just on the green line. Aurora was barely visible to the naked eye, as a pale glow in the northern sky. 35mm – ISO 3200 – f/2.8 – 15s
If your location is north of the green line, then you are likely to see Aurora above the northern horizon. If you are located within the green band, then Aurora might appear even overhead. In the right column of the same page, you can see the short term (1 hour) forecast at any given time. This is where you need to look before heading out.
So yes, you can see Aurora in south Finland…
… and it happens more often than you think. Just check out the forecast as described in the previous paragraph.
The house and street lights on the other side of the lake are far enough not to make huge overexposed halos on the photos. 35mm – ISO 2500 – f/2.8 – 10s
How do you take pictures of Aurora in lower latitudes
Because Aurora will be low above the northern horizon, and most of the times still quite weak, you will need to increase the exposure of your photos. You can do this by either increasing the ISO settings or using longer exposure time (or both in some cases).
The bridge on the left is illuminated at night. With a sensitivity of 2500 ISO and an exposure of 13 sec, it totally blows out the highlights.
Because of the increased sensitivity and exposure, your camera sensor will capture a lot more ambient light as well. As a result, you want to get as far away as possible from city lights. In any case, you don’t want to have any street lights directly in your field of view less than a few hundred meters away from you. Ideally, there also shouldn’t be any major cities 10-15 km north of your location.
Aurora remained quite low on the northern horizon, but was this time clearly visible to the naked eye (although not as colourful). 25mm – ISO 2500 – f/2.8 – 10s
What about editing the images?
Light pollution is definitely your biggest challenge in such conditions. When I can’t go far away enough from the city, there will always be an undesirable glow in the sky. I will give you my “trick” that allows to remove it most of the times: I use a graduated filter in Adobe Lightroom from top to bottom, with the dehaze slider set to a value between 10 and 30. It (almost) always works!
I set the Dehaze slider up to a value of 30 in a graduated filter in Lightroom to get rid of the light pollution.
More information on taking northern lights photography
I took all the photos in this article in Lahti, in southern Finland, at a latitude of about 61°N.
I wrote a detailed tutorial on which equipment to chose, as well as settings. Check them out. I will also always be happy to answer questions, so don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments below.
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