The Aurora Borealis in Finnish Lapland
7 - 20 September 2026.

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Prologue:

My 19th trip to Rovaniemi and Kätkävaara is coming up.
19 times. This trip will set the day counter of Aurora sightings to 192 (excluding day of homebound departure). That is more than half a year. But add to that number the days that I've been occupied with the Aurora at home and we come to many years. However, the intensity of the activities around the Aurora is 24/7 when I am in Lapland. Half a year is a full season according to my friend and senior Aurora Guide Anthony. The 'missing' days are what the guides also miss by weekends and days off. I can, and sometimes do, take over the role of senior guide telling the group of tourists the tales of the technical facts and Saami myths concerning the Aurora. Doing this while my cameras are both shooting away brings me to life, this is where and when I really thrive.
This year however there are complications. In September my Guesthouse will be broken down. The room which is for special guests only has been my home for 15 times, over 5 months all together. When I said goodbye to it on 22 March it felt like an eviction.

27 August 2026:
Preparations in full swing
First of all: I changed the information on the left to the right. This makes this blog better to navigate on a phone. Expanding from 2 to 3 columns I could split the blog info from the menu which appears on top of it and make the info virtually unusable. When on a phone: please rotate your device for a wider view and better experience.

Different environment. Borealis is being demolished as the Guesthouse has had its time and has to make place for a new building covering a different concept so the whole institution 'Guesthouse Borealis' has seized to be. My refuge for now and probably March 27 is the hotel where I started 13 years ago only this time not a room but one of their apartments. Then the escalating competition amongst and between all the safari companies and all the 'safari companies'. To top off the mayhem there is the new management of the company I work with which is now in place for almost a year. I have a real hard time with changes and this is three in a row. Oh well... we'll see. It's Rovaniemi, it's a dump but I like it. On all 4 flights I can keep my most precious gear with me as was again able to upgrade to businessclass, that gives me 4 kgs more and that is exactly what I need. You don't want the morons of Finavia (the airport handlers) to search your baggage. Oh they won't take anything out that they are not suppost to but damaging IS their thing.

06-09-2026:
My checklists are almost completed and luggage almost ready. Looking at the weather in Lapland... well it's volatile... so hoping for the best because at the moment the forecasts for the upcoming week are pretty bad while the sunspots are building up. New spots coming over the western horizon will take some 4 days to arrive at the center of the solar disk. At the moment there are no signs of a coronal hole. Add to that 3 days of traversing the distance to Earth and we're a week down the road. Activity has been modest but in place so in combination with the B-activity of the usual solar-business in theory tomorrow night should give a fair chance on lights... just those clouds...

7 September: Game On!

On the move
remote tarmac Well this is a memorable start... At the train station the elevator didn't work so I had to lug around 56,2 kg of luggage down to the platform. I aimed for a quiet train but I was early and found that the preceding train looked less crowded than reported. My mistake... when we were already moving And I needed the toilet I found out that the crowd was way denser than at first sight and the toilet was broken. The other one was at the other end of the train. Quite an adventure so far. But as this leg of the whole journey stresses me far more than the rest I was allready happy to get to the airport without serious train blues. The baggage drop off opened early and as I had reserved a slot at security I went swiftly from land side to airside. One little hickup: the swab of the security officer signaled drugs 😳. I don't even smoke😱! But a second swab on another sniffer was clean. I always get those tests, must be my appearance... long hair and stuff...
In the once so called 'Tax Free' shops where the only one profiting of tax free ruling is the entrepreneur I found a small light DJI drone that can be flown without license. I have had some footage in my head for a while so I decided that this was the time, place and opportunity to arrest the little scoundrel. And armed with that new acquisition I went to my gate. BC seated Errrr.... sort of... Some sort of poor mans gate in a small space leading to a bus, leading to the plane, on the other side of the airport on a remote tarmac. Great...

Sometimes you are delighted to fly businessclass. One of those times is when you experience a delay and have a really decent space to sit out the wait. 5 luggage containers were discovered at the terminal appearing to belong to my flight. They are quite heavy, the tug is quite slow and the plane was quite far... All in all we left with a 45 minute delay. Sometimes Finnair waits for the delayed passengers but I guess that their gate was vital for other flights just like September 2025 and so was decided to let the connecting flight depart. Add to that the fact that the aviobridge connected to the plane was not to be used (WTF!!!??😳😱) and again today we were stuffed into a bus. Impossible to get that connection and when I finally arrived in the terminal building I saw my original flight take off.

That sucked... but has a silver lining to it. The weather in Southern Lapland is bad, solid clouds and rain so nothing even remote of a chance to look what is above it. Unless of course... you are on a plane! My connecting flight will leave Helsinki at 23:20 due to arrive in Rovaniemi at 00:39hrs. So who knows...
While waiting and writing this blog entry there is only one sensible thing to do: The Best Cappuccino In The Civilized World: Robbert's Coffee

It is 20:23 local time. Missing the connection was compensated with a voucher of 34 euros. That delivers a salmon ryebread, a french bread with ham and cheese and a glass of of wine. I even had to supplement to those vouchers as this stuff cost me 40,70 euros, I kid you not.. Ridiculous. Contemplating today's events made me realize why we couldn't leave the plane through the connected aviobridge. Gate 40 is outside the Schengen terminal and this plane had to be there because of its next destination: Seoul. Let's see what the rest of the evening brings.

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8 September:

Home Worst Home
Aurora from plane The 2nd flight was okay. The Aurora was distant at first but we crossed and passed it on our way to the north. Taking photos from a plane with lit cabin lights is a different thing but I managed. My pickup was at the airport though it was already 01:00 when I got my suitcases. Arrival RVN

But then the distress started all over.
I had booked an apartment at a hotel that I knew from 3x taking a room in 2013 and 2014. Nice and decent, nothing fancy. But that apartment was WAY overaged, bad maintained, furniture that a thrift store would never ever dare to offer let alone sell... and then there was this stank of mold which was well hidden or from earlier days, whatever.... no way that I would stay there. So I got a room with the message it would be for one night and they would look for a permanent solution. The last has not been said about this.
Latest development: I have been assigned to a permanent room and on the backside as the street in the front, being one of the main roads, is very crowded and noisy.
Weather is bad, thick clouds and rain. Tomorrow a Moose safari and possibly an aurora tour. And at home the long awaited replacement Double Stack for my solar telescope is about to arrive in the next hours.

As I write this I have just returned from a look at what is left of my old Guesthouse Borealis, it is still there but being stripped before demolishing. A sad thing to see.

The day went by quite normal, shopping for food and securing things to take home, stuff I always bring home from Lapland. And hunting for T-shirts as they shrink in time. Stupid thing is that while they shrink my scale moves up... must be a leak from the washing machine into my scale or something like that...🫣
At the office of Lapland Welcome I had a real good welcoming and the redecorating was really good on its way. We discussed the use of images and marketing and I'll be working that out. I'm not payed, sometimes you just do a thing as it seems the right thing to do. Being amongst friends that I do not have too many of.

Being knackered of previous short slept nights and an exhausting day yesterday with the delay I was planning to turn in early this evening until Anthony rattled and kept rattling my cage. The parameters were glowing and accordingly the sky did so too. With wrong cloud information still in my weary head I grabbed some photographic first aid stuff and stepped out, crossed the road to evade the street lighting for a bit and... F.U.C.K...!!! the sky had multiple and even perpendicular bands moving around and neglecting the city's light pollution. Well that weary head just snapped into the high speed mode in under a second. So I shot a few timelapse's long and short and as I was observing the structure and character of it and watching the DST-data I realized that the ring power of the Earths magnetic field was charging fast. That forms a magnetic tail at the night side of the planet like a rubber band being stretched and once you over stretch that it will snap... Problem and challenge: when does it snap? It takes some time... calculating the times and energies I reckoned I had between 15 and 75 minutes but sometimes it just jumps you from behind so... time to go in, replace batteries, get a dew heater for my lens and the power bank and get out again but this time I headed for the iconic Lumberjack Bridge while keeping one eye on the sky for opportunities and one on my watch to track the elapsed time.
At the last big crossing of the Koskikatu and Poromiehentie I had to decide... Crossing the bridge to the city camping or going straight to the west riverbank? the first would give me a northwestern view, the second a northeastern. the evening is still young in aurora terms so instinctively I decided to stay on the west bank. That bought me a fortune...
Only seconds after my arrival, just having spread the already extended legs of my tripod, a rift opened straight on top of me and a green hair tie twisting in multiple colours split the sky all over me. This strong light over the city and behind the Lumberjack Candles Bridge had been on my mind for 13 years. So... I came home with 1848 shots to process. That took quite some time: watch it at the Time Lapse page

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9 September:

Settling, drones, hiding Moose and... Roe Deer!
I'm slowly settling. The room is sufficient, the spot in town is good. Not without a cause: this is the hotel where my first three trips of my Aurora Adventure started, but it isn't home like Guesthouse Borealis was. To understand this you must know that one of my distinctive features, also known as peculiarities🤪, is being autistic. That's no secret, I seriously am a neurodiversity advocate specialized in and certified for autism and giftedness. That being said: it doesn't 'solve' those 'problems'. So I still have to find a way to adapt to this new situation and being here at Hotel Aakenus where it all started does help. for the new readers: my website and blog are in English because of all the people I meet here and the ones that are following me.

Roe Deer Well... enough about me. Today I kept myself busy figuring out how my newly acquired drone works and register myself as a drone operator and attaching that registration to my drone. In Europe the EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) requires you to register yourself when flying a drone over 250 grams or any weight equipped with a camera. Once registered you attach your ID to the drone you are licensed to fly. So... a lot to learn app-wise and some basic aviation law. Reading about it it all makes sense as others may be flying around in your vicinity and they may be doing that with any drone150 grams up to much much heavier and I may see that drone but they can hardly see mine...

Mother Moose and calf So when I got through all that I went into town for some shopping and going by the office. For the evening there was a Moose safari planned and there still was just one client. Pickup at my hotel was exactly on time at 18:40 which seems late but the Moose are just waking up around that time as they are nocturnal animals
The last Moose safari of this season. The hunting season is open and the Moose somehow know it so they migrate into nature reserve Pisavaara where they are left alone. There is no fence to secure it, there is no need to, the Finns respect the rule not to go in which by the way is the law as well and if you are found inside you will get a high five with a high fine... as the Moose have become very cautious with humans they are masters in hiding unless you spot them while grazing. Today the only few we spotted were 200+ meters away at the rim of Pisavaara where a mother and calf were looking at us, turned around and disappeared into the safe dense forest. I do have pictures but they are not really worth showing, it was already dark and you only find them by searching with a flashlight which lights up their eyes like perfect mirrors. The photo shows the animal but that's it. In those fields we found some Roe Deer as well, they are common in the south and middle of Finland but kind of rare in Lapland. And of course the Mountain Hare in its summer coat that will soon be switched to white.

Oh and the Aurora.... well she sent her regards vaguely from behind a cloud formation.

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10 September:

Good old Kätkävaara night
LLW Diehards Still working on a 1234 shots timelapse under street lighting of 8 september. The street lighting sets a need for exceptional processing but the results at the start of the evening look quite good. Quite exceptional actually 🤔😃. So processing that sequence took a lot of time.
In the daytime sky all is as usual twice per day four Finnish F-18 fighter jets fly their patrol along the Russian border. It has always been like this, the Finns know their neighbor all too well.
The evening was like in the good old days with Anthony and Reeta. The three of us are the hardcore diehard Three Musketeers of Lapland Welcome Inc. or the Last Of The Mohicans if you will. The three sole survivors of the company as we were around from around 2013, one slightly longer than the other. At the end of last year the ownership and management changed as did the competition in Rovaniemi.
start of aurora Anthony picked me up last and we headed out on solar wind parameters that weren't promising to say the least. The sky was crystal clear but twilight was still dominant and we encountered a few months young baby Moose foraging in the bushes on the side of the road. I wanted to go up hill. Milkyway The parameters were bad and ground fog was forming and with that clear sky the hill top is the only sensible thing to do if you want to get a far away KP1.3 in your sight. At the moment that I reached my usual spot on the rocky hill and managed to balance and level my tripod on the rocks (5-70 cm and everything in between) the aurora started a faint and foremost distant performance. Surprisingly within some 10 minutes she raced towards us and squeezed out a classical green arc with a red top. That was a strange thing as the aurora KP-value had dropped to 1 and the arc should have moved even more northward. But then the clouds came in from the north and that was it. Only at the very end just we we decided to descent the hill the clouds started to thin out and a colourful shoulder grew on the eastern end of the arc being the last sign of life of this performance.

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11 September:

Still unfolding😄
I just added the time lapse of last tuesday at the 8th
This day I obviously finished that time lapse and there are more though not that long. Saving for rainy days which are expected next week. Further activity was doing first preparations for an afternoon out with Zewei for two daytime area visits to Kätkävaara and Vikacongas to shoot some material for the last autumn safari advertisements. This time of year is the Ruska period which means the autumn colours of the forests. So different lenses and of course the drone which I still do not master as I want to. So mastering the drone to a workable level is paramount now.

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12 September:

On the move
Writing about yesterday will be later due to activity over the day today for which I am now preparing.
And a good afternoon it was. We had excellent weather and total almost therapeutic silence deep in the wilderness of Kätkävaara. Red Fungus spider Some nice small red micro mushroom-ish thingies growing in the moss on the rocks. On our way down from the hill we saw a Blackadder slithering quickly through the rocks while my drone was following us. At some point the drone found itself in between four small trees. Its altitude wasn't high enough to fly over them so it got 'caught' and didn't know what to do and couldn't figure a way out. Also its level was way beyond me. The 'Return To Home' function wasn't very appealing too as it returns to its take off point which was at the top of the hill... so... I grabbed one of the trees using it as a drone swatter to make it think it had a collision. And so it did... it shouted it had had a collision and decided to land. Real Intelligence still wins from artificial AI (its intelligence is mainly artificial if intelligence is in there at all😂). Blackadder From there we decided to go back to Rovaniemi and pass it on our way north to a beautifull hiking trail. As it was way to late to hike it we just stayed at the foot of that hill and get some nice Ruska shots there. Ruska
Bridge Vikacongas

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13 September:

Another day
Graph of the Bz Not a very exciting day. Finishing photos from yesterday and went into town through the rain. All safari companies are closed which is strange when you think of it... The sky will be clear tonight, it's close to the equinox the streets should be buzzing from business like years ago but since last summer things seem to have changed, and quite remarkably so. Another strange thing: police everywhere...
Just after nightfall I had my cameras ready and went out to my spot at the Arktikum Museum overlooking the sky from northwest to east. The parameters were looking extremely low so I hadn't any confidence in the Aurora to even show up. The only light in the darkness was the Bz-graph showing the magnetic direction of the solar wind going south in a while. Just few people walking by with torches or headlights that blinded their sights for anything beyond the spot they lit so nobody saw me against the star filled sky.

I actually shot a timelapse of what finally emerged from far out north. 1972 photos to process into a panoramic time lapse, it'll take a while.

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14 September:

A New Hope
Coronal holes + spots Well a good show makes you a beneath-the-Skywalker... 🤓. Tonight is probably the last opportunity for this trip unless some significant spots will develop in the right place to fire their CMEs on the right moment ultimately wednesday to produce stunning lights by Saturday evening which will conclude my chances for this trip. Why this way of looking at it? Well the whole sun is spotless beside the spots moving away. The coronal holes have moved in at the exact right time two days ago and since their stream is usually quite fast it may collide at our atmosphere tonight. There it may run into the much slower CMEs from the spots a day earlier which is illustrated by the Parker Spiral. The red spiraling line is the solar wind from slow CME's and the yellow one is from the faster streams out of the coronal holes. Where the meet is the point over overtaking the slow by the fast which gives a boost in energy. Now if that coincides with the outer rim of Earths magnetic field you get an interesting display of light. And that is exactly what I am hoping for to happen tonight.

By the way... all that police in the streets of Rovaniemi is because of the Arctic/European top here in Rovaniemi about new polar ship routes due to melting polar ice and Russian threat and more.

19:44hrs local time (UTC+3): speed of the solar wind is still low at 354.3 km/s. I guess it is safe to say that that is still not from the coronal holes. More bad news: the magnetic orientation of the solar wind is turning north in some 25-30 minutes. The sky is clear...
Still no clients for the Northern Lights Safari. There are roughly two kinds of Safari Companies. The really good ones that offer you a decent trip and the cheaper ones that go roughly half the price needed to sustain a company for the long run. It feels like the difference of a website and a TIKTOK video that gets no more than 10 seconds attention. See something green in the sky? Tick your bucket list checkbox and move on. Good for you, but be aware of what you paid to get here and what you can tell at home. You saw green maybe but you haven't seen what the Aurora really is. Apart from some lucky people that get an awesome display just by coincidence. So yeah... for those people the well prepared companies with knowledge to share and a program in case the lights do not show are costing you more money. Whether they are more expensive can only be said by experiencing their program.

So my evening started at 21:40-ish. Fully packed I started my 7 minute walk to my spot on the small hill near the museum. Under a clean starry sky I setup my gear being a big heavy tripod with a duo camera support, two cameras and their synchro electronics and the dew heaters to prevent the front lenses from fogging up. I was ready for things to come, game on!
The lights were there in a so far and pale form that even on the back screen I had to search for them and they were on and off and it was exactly that, that on and off, that would define the night. from 23:00-ish onward the sky filled, the whole sky... so much that I kept shooting somewhat shorter time lapses all around me. The Aurora wasn't particular bright, I mean... it was very well visible through the city's light pollution but not that spectacular brightness. What is did do was earning an ADHD status being absolutely restless and all over the sky. Non stop and for hours. The result was that I hardly stopped my cameras and they (still downloading the cards while writing this) produced just short of 8000 photos. And all this was happening with quite moderate to even low parameters and foremost... a northern directed magnetic field of the solar wind. So the energy must have been accumulating in the ring field and magnetic tail behind the planet during the day. A short conversation with Wesley Hogervorst sort of confirmed that as he was thinking the same thing. All based on logic, there are no measurements of that tail.
Around 00:30 I saw a field of south directed wind passing the satellite and that meant another hour to be added to the night. All the times are by heart because I still cannot check the times as the files are still uploading and doing a double backing up. Then around 01:15-ish the sky filled with very much brighter dancing structures with fine detailes moving inside As it couldn't be a snap back of a broken magnetic tail (there was simply not enough energy for that) I reckoned that the timing of the satellite had been flawed or the Alfvén waves had extra contributed to the speed of the field to arrive. Anyway... my impression was that the south directed field had arrived. So as I was getting cold after 3.5 hours standing still at 2 degrees celsius and as the Aurora started fading I called it a night and packed my gear and started the walk back into town. Not such a good idea...
Walking along the very well lit westbound road that heads out of town I suddenly saw a massive huge dome filling half the sky in a ferocious poisonous bright burning green. Being mesmerized I realized that I had no opportunity to shoot it as the street lighting at that road would wash out any attempt to photograph it and a suitable spot was about 150 meters from me. Needless to say that:
1) it took way to long to get to that spot and shoot from the hand
2) such instantaneously actions save you a gym
So yes I have photos of it but way too late to get the core brightness.
This was absolutely a night in my top 2 competing for #1 with 14 March 2018!

First image from my iPhone 13 Pro Max. From this perspective quite intimidating. Rest of the images to follow shortly.

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15 September:

Slow day
Not every day is adventurous. In those days I catch my breath and take things as they come. At nightfall I managed to finally select some photos to stitch two of which I will show here. What happened last night was complicated as the wind from the coronal holes only arrived this evening when the speed finally rose to 750 km/sec. May have been a second wave as at around 03:00 UTC the EPAM monitor also showed activity. But though the activity of last night was on low parameters you have to keep in mind that we are at the verge of the Equinox having the magnetic axle of the Earth in perfect perpendicular angle with the solar wind and that makes a lot of the difference.
I am really glad that the airport has a different lighting system that takes away the most of its light polution signature. From my vantage point I could see the runway lighting being red in rest and being fired up only 10 minutes before a departure or arrival and even that gave a minimal disturbance to the sky.
Arktikum north

I did nothing much, payed a visit to the office of the company and took some photos in the park behind the Arktikum museum. That also brought me to the idea to look for new spots to setup my equipment for future shootings and I managed to find a few very nice ones which for now I won't disclose😎.

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16 September:

Not everything is replaceable
My data storage shows me that I have or am about to cross the 1 TB line of travel generated data for the first time. My laptop has a large space but as you need space to process photos as well I store all that data twice external. Never store valuable data only once! On my flights home I always carry one on me in case of whatever emergency. Insurance covers most of my stuff but all that data is unique. Today it rains so time for the Korundi Museum...

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