Lorenzo Mirandola is no ordinary aurora hunter. First dreaming of the northern lights aged six, he’s now living that dream, taking travelers to see the nightly spectacle, often driving for hours for the best sighting. Elizabeth Claire Alberts joins him in Scandinavia.
It was about 10pm when Lorenzo Mirandola parked the tour van in front of a frozen lake on the outskirts of Saltstraumen, Norway. He dashed outside without his coat and aimed his iPhone at the sky, capturing a faint trail of blue-green light.
“It’s starting,” said Mirandola, his grin framed by a halo of dark curly hair.
By “it,” he meant the northern lights, or aurora borealis—a ribbony, multi-colored light display powered by solar energy. In Finland, people call it the revontulet or ‘fire fox’, based on an old belief that the lights are caused by a magical fox traipsing through the sky. The Northern Sami name for the northern lights is guovssahasat, which means morning or evening glow.
The Italian and French tourists and I hustled out of the van, slipping into coats, hats, boots, and gloves. We crunched down a slope of snow and ice to stand on the frozen lake. Then we looked up. With the naked eye, the start of the aurora looked like a hazy cloud. But as it grew stronger, it turned into an explosion of green and even pink light that pulsed and danced and swirled against a spattering of stars.
Mirandola had set up several cameras on tripods to capture the display, and he leapt between them, making adjustments and snapping shots.
“Wow… Wow!” he cried with boyish excitement, almost as if he were seeing it for the first time. But of course, he’d seen it many, many times before.
Mirandola, 31, is what you’d call a professional aurora hunter. He’s based in Rovaniemi, Finland, a Lappish city that hosts about half a million tourists each year, many of whom are hoping to catch a glimpse of the northern lights.
But you won’t find Mirandola’s aurora hunting business, Arctic Road Trips, listed on any of the city’s official tourist pamphlets. Most people find him through his Instagram page, where he regularly posts pictures and videos of awe-inspiring auroras for his 270,000 followers.
Mirandola moved to Rovaniemi in 2018 and got a job with a company offering evening aurora tours. He loved hunting the aurora, but he sometimes got in trouble for driving further than he was allowed to drive and making the tours much longer than they were supposed to be.
Originally from Verona, Italy, Mirandola said he first began dreaming of the aurora as a six-year-old child. But it wasn’t until he was 23 years old that his wish came true, when he landed in Oulu, Finland, as a university exchange student in 2016. One evening, while eating pasta with friends, Mirandola got a text message about possible aurora activity. He darted outside.
“I had just a t-shirt and shorts on, and it was -1 [degrees Celsius] and I stayed outside for two hours,” Mirandola says. “I was freezing. Afterwards I was sick for maybe two weeks.”
Getting sick didn’t deter Mirandola from going out to see the aurora again—and again and again. He bought a bike and began riding down to a lake in Oulu each night to see if he could catch the lights.
He also began teaching himself how the aurora worked. One thing he quickly learned was that the KP index, which represents geomagnetic activity, didn’t tell you much about what kind of display you’d see, even though KP is used as the main indicator in many popular aurora apps and predictor tools.
The more important value, he said, is the Bz, which measures the direction of the solar wind’s magnetic field. Another thing to keep an eye on are the coronal mass ejections (CME) values, which refer to the release of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outermost part of its atmosphere. And, of course, you have to check cloud cover when looking for the aurora. If the sky isn’t clear, you aren’t going to see anything, Mirandola explained.
After his stint in Oulu, Mirandola moved to Rovaniemi in 2018 and got a job with a company offering evening aurora tours. He loved hunting the aurora, but he sometimes got in trouble for driving further than he was allowed to drive and making the tours much longer than they were supposed to be.
“My boss really liked me because I got so many good reviews because I was driving so far and we were seeing the northern lights basically every night,” says Mirandola. “But I was driving to Sweden, and I was supposed to go maximum 50 kilometers away [from Rovaniemi].”
Mirandola also began training other Rovaniemi-based guides to do as he did—traveling far beyond the city to get the best possible aurora show.
“I wanted to change the market … create a revolution,” said Mirandola. “Big companies don’t like me much,” he added with a laugh.
When I asked Mirandola how he gets the energy to lead these trips, staying up late and driving long hours, he told me the answer is in the northern lights. “Luisa says the northern lights charge me,” he said with a grin.
During this time, Mirandola met two people who changed his life. One was a client for whom Mirandola organized a private dinner in a Finnish kota, a small wooden house ideal for wintertime barbeques. As Mirandola walked the client and his family to the kota, the aurora peeked through the clouds, Mirandola offered to take photos of them in front of it.
“I said [to the client], ‘I can take pictures for you. I only have a small camera, but I can try,’” he said. “The photos weren’t great, but they were so happy.”
The next day, Mirandola got a message from the client: he wanted to buy Mirandola a better camera. “He said, ‘Tell us which camera you think it’s good for northern lights and we will buy it for you,” Mirandola said. “They gave me 4,000 euros. He changed my life.”
The second person who changed things in Mirandola’s life was Luisa Schaffner, a German photographer who came to Rovaniemi in 2020 as an exchange student. They met playing volleyball and fell in love. Luckily for Mirandola, Schaffner had also fallen in love with the aurora. In 2021, they co-founded Arctic Road Trips, offering one-night aurora tours as well as longer aurora expeditions of three to five days.
Now, there are no limits as to how far they can travel to find the aurora. Mirandola said it’s not unusual for them to travel 20-30 hours in just a few days. During the three-day trip I went on in early March, Mirandola drove us more than 22 hours from Rovaniemi through Swedish Lapland and all the way to the Norwegian fjords before returning to Rovaniemi.
The aim of all this travel was to find the clearest skies possible to view the aurora. And it worked. We ended up seeing the northern lights three nights in a row, eventually arriving in Rovaniemi around 4:30am on the fourth day.
“I’m pretty known for the crazy trips we do,” Mirandola said.
Mirandola does come across as a little crazy, but in a good way. It’s not only about the distances he travels, but his ceaseless passion for the northern lights. While driving us across Scandinavia, I watched him juggle two different phones, constantly checking cloud cover, bz values, and CME, while chatting in both English and Italian to me and the other guests. He was also often on the phone with other guides, giving them tips on the best places to go to see the lights.
And when the aurora was out, Mirandola couldn’t focus on anything else. On the first night, we didn’t get into our accommodation until midnight, and we didn’t eat our dinner until about 2am because Mirandola kept calling us outside to look at the aurora, which continued to flare over our heads.
When I asked Mirandola how he gets the energy to lead these trips, staying up late and driving long hours, he told me the answer is in the northern lights.
“Luisa says the northern lights charge me,” he said with a grin. “Even when I’m tired, I still go out. It’s not only because I want to show other people—it’s because I want to see it myself.”
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Elizabeth Claire Alberts is an American-born journalist who lived in Australia for more than a decade before landing in Belgium. She is a senior staff writer at Mongabay, where she writes about all things related to the ocean. Her words have also appeared in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, Sierra, Alternatives Journal, The Dodo, and many other publications.
