Half past ten on a Tuesday night in late September, parked on a gravel pull-off by Kleifarvatn lake, engine off. Our guests, a couple from Singapore celebrating twenty years of marriage, had been asleep in their Reykjavík hotel forty minutes earlier. Now they stood beside our van holding cups of hot chocolate, staring at what looked like a faint grey smudge above the ridge line. “Is that it?” the husband asked. Philippe, co-owner of Lilja Tours and the man who has guided more of our northern lights hunts than anyone, pointed his camera at the sky. The screen lit up green. Ten minutes later nobody needed a camera. The whole sky was moving.

That grey smudge moment happens on almost every successful hunt, and it tells you something most aurora marketing leaves out. The northern lights rarely announce themselves. They build. And whether you’re standing there when they

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