Fri
29 Oct
2021

The polar night has come down over Spits­ber­gen. In the Trom­sø area in north Nor­way, the sun still makes it abo­ve the hori­zon for exac­ty 7 hours as of today. It is get­ting less and less every day now.

Next to the dark­ness, the her­ring has retur­ned to the fjords in north Nor­way.

This means that chan­ces are good now for both nor­t­hern lights and orcas. And that’s what it is (almost) all about for us for a while now. I will be on MS Cape Race for a week now, a ship that I have not been on befo­re. But ever­y­bo­dy keeps tel­ling me that she is gre­at so I did cer­tain­ly not want to miss the oppor­tu­ni­ty as I got the offer to join now. A beau­tiful ship! And a very warm and fri­end­ly wel­co­me. Gre­at!

The­re were still a cou­ple of hours time in Trom­sø befo­re we were get­ting rea­dy to go. I took the chan­ce for an update on the regio­nal geo­lo­gy in Trom­sø muse­um. The famous ter­rel­la was unfort­u­na­te­ly not on dis­play right now, becau­se of recon­s­truc­tion work :-/ well, next time.

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

Now we are on the way, under a beau­tiful sky of stars, even the Mil­ky Way comes out nice­ly, but no nor­t­hern lights yet. Well, we’ll see what the next days bring! The pre­dic­ted Kp value for tomor­row (Satur­day) is real­ly high, so may­be the lights will even be visi­ble from nor­t­hern cen­tral Euro­pe? Fin­gers crossed! Not so good for the north Nor­way area, but we’ll see. We have got time, so our chan­ces for nor­t­hern lights are good any­way. Fin­gers crossed.

Sky of stars over Ull­sfjor­den nor­the­ast of Trom­sø
(pho­to taken from the ship during crui­sing).