Yay, I Finally Saw The Northern Lights, But One Thing Surprised Me

We just wrapped up a trip to Iceland. We had an absolutely amazing time, despite a terrible storm, and I’ll of course write a detailed trip report when I’m back home. As I hinted at in my post about The Retreat at Blue Lagoon, I finally saw the Northern Lights on this trip for the first time, so I want to briefly share that experience.

We saw the Northern Lights twice while in Iceland!

Prior to this trip, I had never really seen the Northern Lights in all my years of travel. That’s probably partly because I typically prefer to travel to warmer climates, and that definitely limits your odds. Now, I say I hadn’t “really” seen them because I’ve sort of seen them from planes a couple of time. But we’re talking about very dim and brief viewings, so I don’t really count those.

The funny thing is that I’ve had an Aurora tracking app on my phone since 2018, ever since I visited Whitehorse on Condor’s (at the time) unique flight from Frankfurt. I can’t count the number of times that I opened the app just out of curiosity and amazement, so I was excited to finally have the chance to use it.

Admittedly Iceland in October isn’t necessarily the best time of year or place to see the Northern Lights. There are places that are darker and further north, where you have better odds. Furthermore, there’s of course an element of luck to all of this, so you can’t actually ever count on seeing them.

We spent our first two nights in Iceland at Torfhus Retreat, which is out in the middle of nowhere, so that gives you the best odds of seeing the Northern Lights, since there’s not much light pollution. On social media, I saw beautiful pictures of the Northern Lights taken from the hotel the two nights prior.

The hotel even offers a Northern Lights wakeup call, so I figured this would be our best chance. Well, go figure on the two nights we were there, conditions were cloudy, and we saw absolutely nothing. We figured that was our best chance, and that we’d only see them on some future trip. I think Ford even felt a bit bad for me, based on my excitement, since I was checking the app every five minutes, and giving constant updates.

Then our next night at the Reykjavik EDITION, there was an absolutely awful snowstorm, the worst in history the country has seen that time of year, so the conditions weren’t clear enough to see much.

The second night at the EDITION, we were laying in bed getting ready to go to sleep with our curtans closed, and I opened my phone one more time to check, just out of curiosity. To my surprise, the Aurora app showed the lights in the area, though I figured conditions outside wouldn’t be good, and therefore we wouldn’t see them.

Well, I opened our curtains, and BAM, there they were! We put on clothes and ran downstairs, and I was delighted we had finally seen them.

The next night we stayed at The Retreat at Blue Lagoon. This day I kind of had a good feeling — the lights had been strong the night before, and the skies were rather clear, with the exception of some scattered clouds.

The hotel also offers a Northern Lights wakeup call, which we had requested. However, we didn’t even end up needing that. Around 9PM I noticed that conditions looked quite good in the app.

Shortly after getting out of the lagoon and while devouring just french fries in the lobby (long story, but don’t worry, I won’t make a separate blog post about it), 😉 the front desk associate mentioned the lights were visible.

So we headed up to the hotel’s rooftop viewing terrace, and sure enough, there they were, much more vibrant than the night before, and in every direction. WOW!

The inconvenient truth of the Northern Lights

Now, I don’t want to speak like some Northern Lights expert based on seeing them twice on one trip. Otherwise I’d be no better than half of the people providing travel advice on social media. 😉 But there was one thing that surprised me.

I was aware that the Northern Lights are much brighter through a camera lens than through the naked eye. However, I wasn’t prepared for just how big the contrast is. Take our “viewing” the last night, at The Retreat at Blue Lagoon.

Through a camera, you’d think these things were just lighting up the sky, and that you’d feel like the earth is putting on some performance for you. Well, truth be told, I only very faintly saw them without using a camera. Like, if I hadn’t been specifically looking for the Northern Lights, I might not have even noticed them, even if outside.

It’s almost like a phone camera is a necessary Northern lights “decoder,” and is needed for them to appear. So I’m curious, since I’m just a rookie here… I realize they’re always more vivid through a lens than to the eye, but do they sometimes even really light up the night without looking through a camera, or is this what it’s always like?

Either way, it was super cool. It’s just that I was caught off guard by how drastic the contrast was.

Bottom line

After being on my bucket list for as long as I can remember, I finally saw the Northern Lights in a substantial way. Obviously this requires luck, and seeing the Northern Lights wasn’t a primary objective of this trip, but it sure was a nice bonus.

What’s funny is that the sightings didn’t happen when or how I was expecting. They didn’t happen at the hotel where odds were the best (due to lack of light pollution and a Northern Lights wakeup call), but they did happen at our hotel in the middle of Reykjavik, with lots of light pollution and no wakeup call.

It was so cool to see them, though the only thing that surprised me was how big the light contrast was between viewing them with just my eyes vs. through my iPhone.