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The Northern Lights – one of nature’s greatest shows on Earth – tops the bucket lists of travelers all over the globe. Join us on a thrilling hunt from Reykjavik to spot this ghostly glow in the night sky. We escape the city’s artificial lights and drive into the deep darkness of the countryside. Your guide will keep a close eye on weather conditions to find the perfect spot to admire the Aurora Borealis. Your encounter with these ephemeral lights will make for a magical night!
Your guide will take free photos of you and the aurora for your travel album, so you’ll always have a reminder of this dazzling moment!
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The minibus Northern Lights tour is one of our most popular tours. We follow the best aurora and cloud forecast available to optimize your chance of seeing the aurora borealis dancing across the night sky. Due to its proximity to the Arctic Circle and the magnetic pole, Iceland’s auroral activity is some of the most intense in the northern hemisphere.
Your Northern Lights tour starts with the thrill of the pursuit. Once your guide picks you up from Reykjavik, be prepared for the hunt. You’ll drive out into the unparalleled beauty of a starry night. As the forecast changes daily, unfortunately, we can’t tell you exactly where our quest for the aurora borealis will take us. But one thing is guaranteed–we will take you far away from the city lights! We could go to Hvalfjörður, Þingvellir, Reykjanes, or to some other rural area in South Iceland to escape light pollution. Traveling by minibus means we can get to offbeat locations that the big buses can’t reach.
If the Northern Lights show up – and it might be at any time – it can be awe-inspiring. They may appear quite subtly, then before you know it, stretch and expand into swirling and dancing patterns across the sky. Whether dramatic or delicate, they’re always a surreal and special sight to behold. Green and yellow auroras are the most common. Blue, violet, and rose auroras are less regular but equally as stunning. Red hues are the rarest, yet they’re more common in Iceland than anywhere else in the world.
During our minibus tour, your guide will snap a photograph of you and the aurora free of charge that you can access online after the tour. See photos from previous tours. We guarantee you that this is a moment you’ll certainly want to have on film!
For the Northern Lights adventure, pick-up is at either 20:30 (8:30 p.m.) or 21:30 (9:30 p.m.), depending on the season. You’ll find the actual pickup time in the booking process and on your final voucher. Picking everyone up can take up to 30 minutes, your patience is much appreciated.
Available pick-up points: Arctic Adventures’s pick-up list.
As the success of the northern lights tour is heavily dependent on weather conditions, we reserve the right to cancel the northern lights part of the tour until 18:15 on the day of the tour if the aurora forecast is not looking good. When this happens your payment is fully refunded. If the tour goes ahead and no northern lights are seen we offer clients the chance to join another evening’s departure free of charge upon availability. Please note that you need to contact us to re-book.
The Northern Lights are natural phenomena and we unfortunately cannot promise you will see them. Their appearance depends upon atmospheric and weather conditions.
For more information on the Northen Lights, please have a look at our Northern Lights information.
Unfortunately, there isn’t just one simple answer to this question.
There isn’t just one single setting for your camera that ensures great photos. But if you have manual options, you are probably best served with experimenting with various combinations of ISO, aperture, and exposure settings. As a rule of thumb, ISO setting between 800 and 3200, aperture between f/2.8 and f/5.6, and shutter speed at between 15 seconds and 30 seconds have proven effective.
A good thing to keep in mind, ISO setting between 800 and 3200, aperture between f/2.8 and f/5.6, and shutter speed between 15 seconds and 30 seconds have given great results.
Different combinations may give very different results. Higher ISO setting will allow you to capture faster exposures, but the downside to this might be for example grainier images.
If the shutter speed is above 15 seconds it will result in a slight star movement.
Wider angle lenses are usually more versatile in low light settings, but longer lenses give you different options for compositions. Make sure that you remove all lens filters, as they may distort images. You will probably get the best results with manual setting for infinite focal length
A refund is not available if the northern lights tour goes ahead and no northern lights are seen but we do offer you the chance to join a Northern Lights Minibus tour free of charge.
Please contact our Customer care to re-book your tour.
When Northern Lights tours are cancelled it’s usually due to unfavourable weather conditions.
In that case, your options will be to:
1. Reschedule for another day.
2. Find another tour to do and use the deposit for it.
3. Get fully refunded.
Please contact our Customer Care to re-book your tour.
Like you might have heard, the northern lights are a pretty difficult thing to predict. You can check en.vedur.is to see the forecast and if the level is high and the skies are clear then it’s very likely that the tour is going. We do update our website’s tour departure sheet with the information at 17:00 pm the latest. If the tour is cancelled, you will receive an email from us.
If we think there is no chance at all of seeing the lights we will cancel the tour. We don’t want to bring you out and disappoint if there is no chance to see the lights.
Yes, the guide will take a photo of you with the northern lights behind you. These can be single or group photo’s and free of charge.
The Northern Lights season is said to be from late August until mid-April. However, if you want to increase your chances of seeing them, it is best to wait until the clear winter months of mid-September until March.
If luck and weather are on your side, then you will be able to see the Aurora Borealis above the inviting streets of Reykjavik. Whether you see the lights or not are dependant on two different factors. The first being the weather. If the sky is clear, no clouds, then you are halfway there to seeing the astonishing spectacle that is the Northern Lights (although light pollution can sometimes be a problem). Increased solar activity is the second half so, if these two merge together you may well be able to see the Northern Lights from Reykjavik.
