Northern Lights Forecast for Sodankylä

Northern Lights in Sodankylä

Sodankylä is a village on Highway 4, 130 km north of Rovaniemi, at the junction where Highway 5 from Kemijärvi joins the road to Ivalo. The municipality is the second largest in Finland by area, with under one inhabitant per square kilometer, and more than half of its people live in the village. It is also home to the observatory that took the first photographs of the aurora in Finland and has watched the sky here since 1914.

The observatory at Tähtelä

The Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, about 6 km south of the village, was founded in 1913 by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Regular measurements began in 1914, and it is now a unit of the University of Oulu. Its all-sky camera has photographed the aurora since 1957, with an optical season from late August to late April.

Aurora photography began here in 1927, and the roughly 600 photographs taken over the next two winters were the first pictures of the northern lights taken in Finland. Most were lost when the retreating German army destroyed the observatory in 1944; about 200 survive. In their first forty years the observers logged more than 1,800 nights with aurora.

The observatory is a working research station, not open to visitors, but its real-time all-sky camera images and aurora forecast are online, the most local check you can make on a Sodankylä night.

Three days of polar night

Sodankylä is just far enough north for the polar night: the sun stays below the horizon from 20 to 23 December. Permanent snow usually comes in the last week of October and goes in mid-May, and the record low is −49.5 °C, set in January 1999.

The log church of 1689

The old church was built at the expense of King Charles XI for the people of what are now Sodankylä, Kittilä, Pelkosenniemi and Savukoski. It is a log church with no tower and an unpainted interior, one of the oldest wooden churches in Finland; it went out of use when the stone church beside it was completed in 1859.

Up and down Highway 4

Coaches between Rovaniemi and Ivalo run along Highway 4 several times a day, stop at Rovaniemi Airport, and take about two hours to Sodankylä. The nearest railway station is Rovaniemi; the airfield at Sodankylä has no passenger flights. Southbound, the turn-off for Luosto, the ski village at the northwestern end of Pyhä-Luosto National Park, is at Torvinen, 14 km from the resort. Northbound, Tankavaara, 90 km up the road toward Saariselkä, is where gold was found in the 1930s; its Gold Prospector Museum has indoor gold panning in winter.