Northern Lights

During your stay at The Friendly Moose, hosts Paul and Maria will do their best to make sure you witness the Northern Lights. 

The Aurora Borealis is one of nature’s most amazing and moving spectacles. The lights occur when charged particles from the sun travel the 149 million km to the Earth and strike atoms in Earth’s atmosphere causing electrons in the atoms to move to a higher-energy state. When the electrons drop back to a lower energy state, they release a photon: light. This process creates the beautiful aurora, or northern lights.

That’s the scientific part, but according to Sami legend, and far more romantically, the lights are caused by a magical fox running across the Arctic fells. 

Staying at the Friendly Moose you will have a chance to see the lights far from crowds and buses and being out in the still and silent forest waiting for the lights is an amazing experience. Wrap up warm though!

Our house is in a really good location to see the aurora and we monitor the forecasts to give our guests the best chance of spotting them. Having said that though, they are a natural phenomena that can come and go in just a couple of minutes, so we recommend frequent looks out the window through clear nights.

For guests wishing to photograph the lights there is lots of great advice available on the web. We have a spare tripod available, but you will need your own camera-to-tripod fixing. Mobile phones can also get some surprisingly good photos, but again a mini tripod to keep the camera still is best.