“The film is a long-held dream come true”, says Sampo Puoskari, Tietomaa’s liaison coordinator.
Oulu’s Tietomaa Science Centre bought Kast’s four-minute film and shows it on a screen eight metres long and four metres high (26 by 13 feet). He blogs about it, offers aurora borealis trips for tourists and has published a calendar of his photos. What began as a hobby now takes up an increasing amount of space in his life. “In this respect, the human eye is far superior to technology,” he says. A still photo with a long exposure time is required to capture them, so Kast made a time-lapse video instead. The Northern Lights don’t lend themselves to being filmed. With the green, yellow and orange Northern Lights visible on the horizon, Kast shows the nightly movement of the stars by combining a sequence of 200 photos into one. More than 60 freezing nights resulted in hundreds, maybe even thousands of photographs, from which Kast created a time-lapse video entitled Aurora: Queen of the night. Sometimes Kast journeys for hundreds of kilometres just to enjoy cloud-free skies somewhere in northern Finland – just to capture the mesmerising Northern Lights. “Recently, unbelievably strong auroras were being predicted, but what good is that if the sky here in Oulu is covered with clouds? Then there’s no chance of seeing the lights.” “And then the weather has to play along,” he says. And you need patience and, if possible, absolute darkness. Geomagnetic fields, wind speeds, the surface activity of the sun and many other factors influence his decision. A blur of tables, graphs and figures demands to be deciphered and correlated. Photo: Thomas Kast/Salamapajaīefore he heads out, the Northern Lights obsessive pores endlessly over various websites giving predictions of where to catch the aurora borealis. Kast logs hundreds of kilometres each year seeking out the aurora borealis all over northern Finland. It’s impossible to operate the camera’s small buttons wearing thick thermal gloves. “The worst thing is the cold fingers,” Kast says. After his family, the Northern Lights form his other great passion.Ī camera, a tripod, spare batteries, a torch and a flask of tea: That’s about all he needs when he sets out into the night – apart from three or four layers of clothing and warm boots, of course.
He came to Finland for career reasons and wound up staying after he met the love of his life. Originally from near Karlsruhe, Germany, Kast has lived in Finland since 2000 and works for a major mobile network company based in Oulu, a university town of 190,000 people about 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. For hours he’s been standing in the cold, hoping to experience a moment of magic: the appearance of the Northern Lights. His camera is displaying early signs of freezing up. The thermometer shows 18 degrees below zero Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit). You can see the resulting photos in our slideshow below. He’s standing in a snowy forest glade in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis.
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