Visit Lapland in the winter months and there’s a good chance you’ll get to see the northern lights, as long as you get a bit of luck on your side with cloud conditions and solar activity.
Lapland is far enough north to get regular sightings of the northern lights during winter, but there are a few things to bear in mind to increase your chances of seeing the northern lights in Lapland.
The first is cloud cover. If it’s cloudy, nothing else matters – you won’t see the northern lights as they occur way up above the clouds.
If seeing the northern lights in Lapland is an important part of your visit, you could increase your chances by booking a last-minute stay in Lapland based on the weather forecast.
If you see a week of clear weather on the forecast and you can make a last-minute booking, you’ll have increased your chances of seeing the northern lights considerably.
However bear in mind weather conditions in Lapland can change quickly – and even while we were there, we had clouds roll in on days when the forecast had been sunny – and one night we missed a great northern lights display because we went to bed expecting dense cloud cover only to find it cleared while we were sleeping and the northern lights appeared after all.
See the northern lights in Lapland with an alerts app
If weather conditions end up being in your favour during your stay in Lapland, the best thing you can do is download a northern lights alert app to your phone, which will notify you whenever the lights appear.
I was sceptical of this at first, wondering how accurate could it really be.
However one evening we went out on a ‘northern lights safari’ excursion – to a clearing in the forest.
As we sat looking at the clear, blank sky suddenly the faintest, dimmest hint of the northern lights appeared – so dim we wouldn’t have even noticed if it weren’t for our guide pointing it out to us.
As he did so, my phone sounded a notification: ‘aurora alert – northern lights seen in Ranua’ (exactly where we were).
The app we were using was called ‘Aurora Alert Realtime’, which was free to download (iPhone or Android) and extremely simple to use.
They have night-vision cameras observing the sky in the following regions and when northern lights appear, an alert is triggered on the app.
That night, after our dim sighting of lights on our safari tour, we were getting into bed around midnight and about to go to sleep, when the phone started buzzing with more alerts.
We got out of bed, got our coats and boots on and went outside our lodge to see a very clear display of the lights above us.
The Aurora Alert app had saved us from missing seeing the northern lights for a second time, and this time we got some great photos and video from an extended display of the lights right above our accommodation at the Ranua Resort.
One thing I did find is that a phone camera sees and highlights the northern lights brighter than they are with the naked eye.
I haven’t edited the photos on this page – I didn’t do anything to brighten or artificially manipulate the images, but the northern lights in these pictures do look brighter than they did to the naked eye.
It seems the phone camera makes them appear brighter, and that actually helped when it came to locating the lights in the sky as you could point the phone into the sky and see the lights emerging on the screen before they appeared by sight.
One other thing I did that helped with seeing the northern lights in Lapland was re-configuring the notifications on my phone slightly.
I wanted to be alerted during the night if the lights appeared while we were sleeping, but I didn’t want to be constantly woken up by all my other phone notifications, which are normally silenced when the phone’s in ‘sleep mode’.
On the iPhone, you can change the ‘focus’ settings of the sleep mode to allow notifications from specific apps you select, so I simply added the Aurora Alert app in this setting, meaning the phone would alert me even while all other notifications were silenced.
And to make it even easier, I changed the phone’s default alert (in the iPhone’s ‘sounds and haptics’ menu) to a loud alarm sound, to be in no doubt that it’d wake me up if the northern lights appeared.
One final tip, if you’re wanting to photograph the northern lights in Lapland, is bring a small tripod with you.
If you’re using your phone’s camera, it’ll need long exposure settings which means it needs to be held dead still, as any vibrations from your hand will increase the chances the photo will be blurry. Using a tripod along with a remote / Apple Watch (or just the phone’s self-timer setting) will help avoid that.
Useful information
The Lapland Aurora Alert Realtime app.