For nearly three hours, the sky over Arctic Norway kept blinking.
Tom Kerss, chief aurora chaser for Norwegian coastal voyage operator Hurtigruten, said he found the footage while looking back through material from his latest season of northern lights voyages.
“I’ve been chasing the Northern Lights for more than 18 years, and this occurrence is one of the most profound sightings of my career and the most memorable night of aurora-chasing I’ve experienced,” Kerss said in an emailed statement.
Kerss said typical pulsating aurora displays last 10 to 20 minutes, but this event lasted almost three hours. Hurtigruten said it was an unusually powerful display and one of the longest on record.
“Even to the naked eye, it was clear something exceptional was happening, with visible pulses and shifting colour,” Kerss explained. “The display lasted for hours, flashing pink and green long after midnight.”
He recorded the display in real time on February 22, 2026, using a Sony A7S camera and 14 millimetre F1.4 lens onboard Hurtigruten’s MS Trollfjord during an intense geomagnetic storm.
Pulsating auroras are commonly linked to powerful auroral substorms that occur somewhat regularly, especially in high-latitude regions such as Arctic Norway. But Hurtigruten said seeing them spread across the entire sky and last for hours is very unusual.
Hurtigruten runs northern lights voyages along Norway’s Arctic coast, including dedicated Astronomy Voyages led by Kerss and a team of astronomy experts. Upcoming trips include a January 2027 sailing featuring Space.com skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic as the onboard aurora expert.
These blinking aurora displays are thought to be driven by waves of energy deep within Earth’s magnetic tail, the stretched part of the planet’s magnetic field that extends into space away from the sun. The waves, known as chorus waves, send bursts of charged particles toward Earth’s upper atmosphere.
When those particles collide with gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, they produce flashes of light that appear to switch on and off across the sky. In the video, pink flashes often appear first, followed by green, because nitrogen emits its pinkish glow almost instantly while oxygen takes a fraction of a second longer to produce green light.
“The footage captures not just the beauty, but rare detail that offers real scientific insight,” Kerss said.
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