Photographer Florian Kuhnt was hiking with a friend in northern Norway in order to capture the northern lights. On his last night, he was about to pack up his camera when he noticed a bright light in the sky, what he would later realize was a NASA rocket.
Kuhnt, who studies aerospace engineering in Hamburg, Germany, and does landscape and outdoor photography part-time, tells PetaPixel that he was in the Lofoten region of Norway in order to specifically photograph the northern lights.
“The plan was to hike up Ryten to capture the sunset and northern lights over the Kvalvika beach, camp there for one night, hike down the next morning to the beach, and then back to the car,” he says. “Around 5.5 miles round trip.”
The two reached the summit in the early evening and started to take a few photos. They eventually came down a bit from the true summit because the high winds made it impossible to set up a tent.
After setting up the tent we stayed outside in the cold to wait for northern lights. At that time I had already set up my camera and took a few pictures of our tent under the stars,” he continues.
The northern lights are somewhat predictable, but their strength is affected by the time of year and even then varies from night to night.
“Almost two hours later, the first northern lights appeared but were really, really faint,” he says. “So I patiently waited for more while my friend went into the tent to prepare everything for the night.”
“I suddenly noticed two really bright, cloud-like objects moving in the sky,” he recalls. “They moved really fast across the sky coming from the south towards the north. The whole event lasted about five minutes and I was able to get a few shots. Due to the fast velocity, I had to increase the ISO up to 12,800 for a higher shutter speed to get a decent exposure without motion blur.”
“I googled the latest rocket launches and saw that an Atlas V rocket just launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying the Landsat 9 Satellite,” he says. “After a bit of research, I was sure that we just witnessed the deorbit burn of the Centaur Upper Stage and fuel blowout. Those both clouds got illuminated by the Sun which made them visible. The rocket itself is too small to see with the eye since it’s orbiting between somewhere about 550 to 680 kilometers in altitude. The launch alone would be really exciting to witness but that it flew right through the northern lights was just the icing on the cake.
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