67°25′N · 26°35′E — Sodankylä, Finnish Lapland
Notes from under the auroral oval
Night Sky Archive is the shared logbook of three friends who photograph the sky above Lapland — aurora, the Milky Way, comets, planets and faint galaxies — through the long kaamos darkness and nights of minus thirty. Since the winter of 2016 we have kept every capture, every cloudy drive and every frozen battery.
Latest captures
The four most recent plates added to the archive. Every capture keeps its date, place and full exposure data, because the numbers are half the fun.
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Deep-sky · M101
Pinwheel, deep
- Camera
- ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, −10 °C
- Optics
- Sky-Watcher Esprit 100ED
- Exposure
- 140 × 300 s · gain 100
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Aurora
Severe storm, 12 November
- Camera
- Sony A7 IV
- Lens
- Sigma 14mm f/1.8 DG HSM Art
- Exposure
- 2 s · f/1.8 · ISO 2500
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Deep-sky · NGC 7000
North America in hydrogen
- Camera
- ZWO ASI533MC Pro + L-eXtreme
- Optics
- William Optics RedCat 51
- Exposure
- 84 × 300 s · gain 100
Ten years in numbers
Counted from the logbook spreadsheet, February 2016 to October 2026. Cloudy drives count as nights logged; they are most of them.
Explore the archive
Guides we wish we had when we started, written from what actually worked at 67 degrees north.
Guide
Aurora at 67°N
What the Kp index really tells you this far north, when the season starts, and the places we drive to when the magnetometers jump.
Read the guide →Calendar
The Moon, this month
A lunar calendar computed in your browser for this month and next, with notes on midwinter full Moons that never set.
Open the calendar →Catalogue
27 deep-sky targets
Galaxies, nebulae and clusters that climb high from Lapland, with magnitudes, best months and our own notes.
Browse objects →Workflow
Gear & processing
From a phone on a tripod to a cooled camera in a shed, plus the stacking workflow and the cold-weather lessons that cost us lenses.
See the kit →Diary
The observing logbook
Twenty-four entries from 2021 to 2026: temperatures, sky quality readings, Kp values and what went wrong.
Open the logbook →People
About the three of us
A physics teacher, a snowmobile guide and a night-shift nurse who met over a thermos of coffee on a fell in February 2016.
Meet the group →From the logbook
The latest three entries. The full logbook goes back to 2021, when we started writing things down properly.
· Sodankylä
Season opener for the shed
Re-did the polar alignment after the frost heave, built a fresh flats library and ran a two-hour test on M33. −6 °C, SQM 21.3, aurora quiet at Kp 2 all evening.
Full entry →· Kilpisjärvi
Saana in green
First big display of the season. Kp 6 for six hours, curtains folding over the fell and a lake that had not frozen yet. All three of us, for once, in one place.
Full entry →· near Burgos, Spain
Totality, 3 000 km south
Aino and Saara flew south for the total solar eclipse. Low Sun, warm wind, and a little under two minutes of darkness that felt like ten seconds.
Full entry →Why photograph from this far north?
Sodankylä sits almost exactly under the average position of the auroral oval, the ring of light that circles the geomagnetic pole. On a clear, dark night here, some aurora is the rule rather than the exception. The same latitude that gives us the aurora also gives us kaamos, the polar twilight: around the winter solstice the Sun barely lifts its upper edge above the southern horizon at noon (three hours’ drive north, in Inari, it does not rise at all for weeks), and the sky is dark enough for deep-sky work by three in the afternoon.
The price is summer. From late April to mid-August there is no real darkness at all, and the cameras sit in a drawer. We spend those months processing, fixing gear and arguing about colour balance.
There are smaller gifts too. Objects in the northern sky — the Plough, Cassiopeia, the galaxies M81 and M82 — pass almost straight overhead, through the thinnest possible layer of air. Planets in Gemini and Taurus climb high in winter. The southern sky, on the other hand, is mostly off limits: the Orion Nebula never gets more than about seventeen degrees up.
At a glance · Sodankylä
- Latitude / longitude
- 67.42° N · 26.59° E · 179 m
- Midwinter noon
- Sun grazes the horizon, ~21 Dec
- Midnight sun
- early June – mid-July
- Aurora season
- mid-August – mid-April
- Polaris altitude
- 67.4° — nearly overhead
- Finland’s cold record
- −51.5 °C (Pokka, Kittilä, 1999)
- Our darkest SQM reading
- 21.8 mag/arcsec² (Pallas, 2021)