Chasing the Northern Lights in Tromsø can be a magical experience — but given the city’s light pollution, it’s usually a frustrating one. If you want to see the sky light up in dancing ribbons of green and white, you have to leave the city behind, heading out to where it’s nothing but fjords, mountains, and sky as far as the eye can see.

That’s exactly what I did, spending five nights standing outside in hopes that the weather would cooperate and the lights would appear. Because no matter where you go, there’s no guarantee that you’ll see anything more than cloudy skies. But there are ways to maximize your chances.

Night 1: Settling in for the Waiting

My friends and I chose to stay in Nordby, a tiny spit of charming nothing at the end of nowhere else, south of Tromsø just over an hour on ice-slicked roads.

We moderated our hopes. We prepared to wait. And then at 6:30, when it had only been dark for an hour or two, one of our party said, “Is that a green line in the sky?”

Yes! There it was, unmistakable and bright, a band stretched across the entire night sky. And there we were, freezing cold and trying to decide when to sacrifice our fingers to pull out our phones.

We learned a lot in that first half an hour:

• Have all of your outdoor layers ready to go by the door at any moment.
• You’ll always see brighter colors through your camera lens than with your eyes.
• Set the exposure to at least 10 seconds if you’re using your phone camera.
• Hand warmers make a big difference.

We also discovered that the lights are ephemeral. Ours lasted less than thirty minutes, and we did not see them again that night.

Night 2: Sinking Hopes

Our first night was so exciting that we had high hopes for the second. But when the clouds started moving in over the water, we knew we would be spending the night indoors.

Still, someone ran to check every hour or so … just to come back in almost immediately with the same glum report: no lights.

We had chosen to chase the Northern Lights in a year with peak solar activity. But we quickly learned that the weather matters just as much in the calculus of whether you see lights or not. And while we picked Norway over Iceland because the weather in Iceland can be tricky, it turns out that Norway has its fair share of winter clouds as well.

Night 3: Nothin’ But Clouds

It didn’t take a weather app to see that the clouds were here to stay. But at least we’d planned a trip to learn about Sami culture and feed the local reindeer, which kept our spirits high.

We traveled in mid-February, which meant we had just enough midday light for an early afternoon walk over a frozen lake. But we didn’t venture out at night at all — this was an evening for soup, charades, and stories by the fire.

Night 4: Green Glimmers Return

Blue skies showed themselves by late afternoon, which had us ready to head back out as soon as it grew dark. We kept popping in and out of the house, because you never know when the lights might show.

Chasing the Northern Lights can involve a lot of waiting. In Iceland two years ago, I woke myself up to check for lights by setting alarms for 11:00 p.m., midnight, and 1:00 a.m. to look out the window (there’s a reason people stay in hotels with Northern Lights wake-up services). Fortunately, we didn’t have to start sleeping in shifts — hazy streams of green started spreading across the sky at 8:45. By 9:15, we found ourselves standing beneath a full-on light show.

And wow, was it cold. Temperatures had dropped to 1° F (that’s -17° C), and the wind whipped around our faces and through our thickest layers. This was a night where thermal underwear and windproof snow pants really paid off. We really needed them because we were out (or huddling in the car) for over two hours, watching the lights shift and finally settle into a pinkish-teal haze.

Night 5: Skies Aflame

You never know what you’ll get when you’re chasing a natural phenomenon. There’s so much risk, so much room for disappointment — and so much sheer, utter joy when it all works out. On our last night, had you been able to hear anything over the wind, you would have been treated to shrieks of delight and whoops of triumph. This was the light show we’d been waiting for.

These lights bent and moved faster than we could follow them, tracing one pattern after another in rapid succession. We watched the whole sky come alive — you can see why ancient legends thought these apparitions might be ethereal dancing women.

Streaks of green, pink, and white appeared more vividly than anything we’d seen before. The entire sky opened up to reveal myriad possibilities.

We stayed up watching the show for over four hours, until fatigue sent us off to bed. But the sky still had a quiet sort of magic when I woke up at three in the morning.

Chasing the Northern Lights: Was It Worth It?

I’m glad we stayed well outside the city and gave ourselves five full nights to work around the weather. Each night is so different, and with shifting success comes shifting emotions. Northern Lights chasing is a risky business. And this kind of beauty and elation, I would go again in a heartbeat.

If you’re curious about the aurora borealis, I enjoyed this New York Times article about current scientific efforts to understand it.