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).