It’s 3:13 a.m. and the telephones in my suite on board Hurtigruten’s MS Trollfjord are abuzz. Elation and center of the night time calls don’t normally go hand-in hand, however whenever you’re looking for the northern lights, these pings can solely imply excellent news.
The aurora borealis is the complete motive for this journey up Norway’s coast and our first main sighting has felt like a very long time coming. My husband and I are 7 days into the 15-day crusing and cloudy skies have stolen our possibilities. (We did get a transient glimpse of the Aurora Oval—a secure ring of auroral gentle above the Earth’s geomagnetic North Pole—as we sailed underneath it on day 4.)
We are 2 of the 25 individuals who’ve signed up to be a part of the inaugural Astronomy Voyage group on a premium, all-inclusive Signature cruise led by Hurtigruten’s Chief Aurora Chaser, Tom Kerss. The astronomer and writer with a background in astrophysics and spacecraft engineering is our host on board this “academic odyssey” designed around the bucket-list phenomenon, first documented as the northern lights in Norway in the 13th century. One of things we’ve learned already? How fleeting they can be. So, when the phone chimes, we are fully prepared.
We’ve ditched the pajamas we introduced with us and now sleep in our thermal underneath layers. And the whole lot we’d like to head exterior—fleece jacket, snow pants, heavy coat, wind balaclava, mitts, warmth packs, and all of our digicam gear and backup chargers—are lined up and prepared to go. Just earlier than heading out to Deck 9, darkened by the captain in anticipation, we slip on the really useful ice grips for our footwear and waddle alongside the snowy deck to meet our group in the darkish. There, Kerss, with a telltale pink gentle on his zipper (the solely method to set him other than all the different hooded beings on the market), makes use of a inexperienced laser pointer to direct our eyes up towards the sky.
What we see after we lookup isn’t the neon dancing lights you’ve doubtless seen on social media. Instead, the arcs in the sky are wispy white, with the occasional faint inexperienced shade combined in. They appear to be vertical clouds dancing over a inexperienced highlight. But after we raise our cameras for a higher look, what greets us is mesmerizing. Bright inexperienced funnels raise and arch over the entirety of the ship. In the distance, splotches of purple and fuchsia appear to explode. The deck is silent however for the clicking of cameras and the low buzz of exclamations as a new set of lights seem. We stand collectively in the chilly, observing the sky and our screens, awestruck by the second.