Iceland Part One: The Northern Lights

Recently I took a holiday in Reykjavik, Iceland and that’s going to be the focus of the next set of posts. The main reason I wanted to go there was the opportunity to see the Northern Lights, and I was not disappointed. Of course, there were no guarantees that my tour group would get to see them – some in my group were on their second attempt – but we were very lucky in that the cloud cover broke enough for us to see the lights (nine other tour groups that went out on the same night were not so lucky).

It did take a lot of patience from when our coach first spotted the beginning of the lights and pulled over to a safe spot until they fully materialised. There was a lot of waiting in the freezing cold as they started to appear only to then disappear behind some clouds. Eventually we saw streaks of green gradually growing brighter and we were able to see some of them dancing across the sky, before they headed back behind some cloud. This continued for quite a while!

Unfortunately the best picture I could get was the below. I’d managed to work out how to change my shutter speed on my camera to that recommended by the tour guide but the lights never quite got bright enough for my camera to cope; others in the group with more sophisticated cameras managed to take the more traditional looking pictures of the lights everyone is familiar with.

Even without photographic evidence the whole experience was well worth the trip. Our tour guide in particular, from Reykjavik Excursions, was brilliant; dryly sarcastic he filled us in on the area we were travelling through and the history of Reykjavik, as well as more recent news – Yoko Ono was in town lighting the Imagine Peace Tower that week, for instance.

I’d definitely like to see the lights again, hopefully with a little less cloud cover this time, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to see them on my first trip out and in such a lovely setting.