The wind has now turned into a fierce storm;
In a vast arc, stretching far,
From east to west, the thundercloud races,
With flashes of fire and roaring sound;
Crashing and hissing like rock serpents.
Aleksis Kivi (Considered one of the founding figures of Finnish-language literature)

The trees have bent but not fallen. The old man next door (a wise one) mentioned that if it had been freezing, they would’ve snapped like straw. But with slightly warmer temperatures, they were flexible and swayed with the wind day and night, back and forth, though only a few actually broke. Perhaps that’s why we avoided power outages. Earlier in winter, they happened often due to the heavy snow on the trees. But this storm seems to have stripped every last loose needle from the branches, leaving them bare.

The sky, too, has been wild many nights. To borrow from Kivi again, the northern lights have surged and swirled like dragons across the sky, filling it with flames. From east to west, north to south, the sky has been on fire, with waves of green dancing overhead.

I still marvel at the northern lights every time I see them, even though they appear fairly often. There's something magical about them that remains, and it frustrates me that it's impossible to truly capture that magic in a photo. On social media, you come across stunning, mesmerizing images of the aurora, one more beautiful than the last, but none of them compare to witnessing it in person.

Why is that?

The truth is that in photos, the aurora often appears more beautiful, at least brighter. It's rare to see northern lights as vivid as they look in photographs, even in the north. That’s because a camera can capture the light over several seconds in a single frame, making them glow brighter and more colorful.

But what makes the aurora truly magical when you witness it yourself, embraced by the dark, is their movement.

Movement can't be captured, not even adequately on video. The northern lights move in their own way—something not quite of this world, maybe not even of this dimension. They twist and swirl, moving both slowly and quickly at the same time, somewhere between our world and another. And you can only see that with your own eyes. It's no wonder they’ve held deep meaning for those who’ve lived in the north for so long. They’ve been seen as messengers, bringing and carrying news from the other side, greetings from those who’ve passed and from other beings. It's a shame that in our science-driven world, we brush aside such things like a snowflake off a mitten. Well, times change.

The other night, I spent a long time watching the northern lights storm across the sky, wrapped in my winter coat on the shore. It was a warm evening (too warm for February, if you ask the wise old neighbor), but the wind blowing from every direction cooled the air and made it feel colder even under the thickest jacket.

When I couldn't bear the cold any longer, I left my camera out to brave the storm on its own for the rest of the night, doing its best to capture the movement of the northern lights across the northern sky. By morning, I brought the camera inside, its battery long drained and frozen from the cold night air. Altogether, it had captured 1,732 photos of the aurora.

When you string these images together, you can create a time-lapse video that gives you a glimpse of how the northern lights move. I've included time-lapses like this before in my YouTube videos (you can find one at the end of this video, for example). Putting them together takes time (try editing 1,732 photos on a computer...), but they capture the essence of the aurora's magic and movement far better than a single photo ever could.

I’d love to make a longer northern lights video—something you could watch for ten minutes or even longer. But that takes time. That's why I'm collecting these aurora nights and the thousands of photos that come with them. To make a ten-minute aurora video, it could take hundreds of thousands of photos, maybe more.

Now I’ve added 1,732 more to the collection.