A mooring, ice stations and the sun Oct 18 2026

This article is part of the series “2026-10: Fram Strait cruise KPH”.

16 October

The polar bear is gone. The dinner has been eaten. Now it is time to recover F12, another mooring which is underwater and has measured a variety of values for 14 months. The ship’s echo sounder has already located it, so it has “only” to be released from the ground. There is only one issue – there is a lot of ice and to recover the mooring, open water is needed. The helmsman has already circled the icebreaker several times to create an ice-free area. When the mooring is finally released, the air-filled buoy pops up in the water, just two metres away from the searchlight. Chapeau! I mentioned in the last article the joint effort that is needed to get such a mooring with more than 1800 metres of Kevlar cable equipped with instruments from the sea onto the ship.

17 October

When there is ice, it’s an opportunity for an ice station. Again, this is teamwork. Besides the scientists on the ice, you need a polar bear guard with a rifle on the ice and three bridge watches on the bridge on deck 8 that are constantly observing the surroundings for polar bears, cracks in the ice, fog coming up, and other potential dangers. I handle the communication between the bridge and the team on the ice, and luckily nothing happens. The only thing I have to do is to keep track of the people who are on the ice.

There are my things: A bottle of water, my own binoculars (I have had them for more than 40 years), a VHF radio for communication and a notebook with a ballpen for taking notes.

I haven’t seen the sun for days, but now, while I am taking the second shift, the sun is rising from a low layer of clouds on the horizon. I can see its reflections in the windows on the other side of the bridge while the ice team works in the ship’s shadow.

For the rest of the day, I do computer work but interrupt it several times just to go outside and take some photos from the helicopter deck, which is on deck 6 at the bow of the ship. You never know how long the good weather will last. I am there while the sun is shining, I am watching the sllloooowww sunset, and I am there in the evening, when it is the ship that is illuminating the ice.

Ice on the Fram Strait, October 2026 III

Ice on the Fram Strait, October 2026 VII

I am already in bed when I see a post in our group chat mentioning Jupiter and Mars. I put my down clothes over my pyjama, put the helmet on my head and go out onto the “helideck” one last time for the day. The night is starry and there they are: Both Jupiter and Mars near the horizon, accompanied by many stars. But there are also big spotlights, which make the view somehow special. The stars are slightly out of focus, but I am showing a photo nevertheless.

18 October

Another day – another ice station. I will do the first bridge watch and then go onto the ice myself to fly a drone. Around 10 o’clock, the team enters the ice.

Two things are certain on an expedition with the icebreaker Kronprins Haakon. All meals are on time. Everything else may and will change. This time, it is a crack in the ice that I observe. I inform the team on the ice. I have to give several updates, because more and more cracks appear. After less than half an hour, both the team and their equipment are safely back on board, and the ice station is aborted. Between the first and the last of the following photos lie 18 minutes.

After lunch – the second try. I may join the team in the beginning, because, although the conditions for drone flying are not the best (mediocre visibility, low temperatures, high humidity), the winds will increase in the afternoon. It’s now, or never.

Fifteen minutes later, I am on the sea ice. At first, I let the drone fly at an altitude of only 2-3 metres for two minutes. I land it and check the propellers. Are they free and able to move? Is there visible icing? What about the battery? Luckily, everything looks fine. With a new battery I lift the drone up to 65 metres to fly a zigzag pattern to get a mosaic of photos to be stitched together later. The flying itself works pretty well, although I get some wind warnings on the display of my remote control. I have some minor issues with the camera gimbal and take another flight to get some backup photos. At the very end I take a snapshot of our icebreaker.

And a selfie or two. I am wearing a survival suit and a helmet from the Norwegian Polar Institute, a woollen sweater I bought in Longyearbyen two years ago and a balaclava knitted by my friend Christine.

When I have finished, I leave the sea ice. After redressing and a small break I take another bridge watch. Nothing happens, and so it should be. The exciting part comes thereafter. Are the photos – 126 in total – suitable for an orthomosaic? I mean, the single shots look like this:

Preview of the drone photos in Lightroom

An then, the relief: WebODM, the software successfully stitches together the photos.

Why does the image has this odd angle? Because it contains spatial data, so that it can be used in GIS systems. It is therefore aligned north. Here is a cropped version aligned parallel to the ship:

Will there be another ice station? I’m pretty sure. Probably not tomorrow, when we expect another strong gale, with wind speeds above 20 m/s. So I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, apart from one thing: all meals will be on time.

28 September – 1 October – the last days Oct 11 2026

This article is part of the series “2026-09: Canada”.

It was more than three weeks ago that our holiday in Canada began. We still have some days left, but we are on the home stretch. It has been a spectacular holiday with many more impressions than I had hoped for, and if I had to say what the best part was, I couldn’t give a single answer. Besides, I got to share it all with my wife Annika.

28 September

After the wonderful previous day, when we drove the Icefields Parkway we have another day at the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, a ski resort 500 metres above the town of Golden, My plans for the day; a swim in a lake and an afternoon nap. But first: breakfast.

Breakfast in our apartment in the Glacier Mountaineer Lodge

We take the car to the Cedar Lake, a nice bathing lake nearby. First we hike to Astro Lake through autumnal forests. The way back is a bit longer than expected, and a chance to cool down in Cedar Lake, which has its own bathing jetty is mostly welcome. I spend some time swimming in the cold water, and back at the apartment I am shivering. Luckily, our apartment has a bathtub, which gives me my second bath of the day.

29 September

Oh, this is an early morning. For three weeks we have been spreading out all our belongings in our rental car, now everything is properly packed again, because today we have to return the car. Not in Golden, but in Calgary – 300 km away – by 10 o’clock. When we start, it is pitch black and it is raining. It takes more than an hour until I can distinguish the mountains against the cloudy sky.

Returning the car works like a charm. There is a dedicated lane off the road and the friendly staff wave us into a parking bay. We take our belongings, return the key, and that’s it. We take the number 500 bus into town and another one to our Airbnb apartment, leave our luggage and look for a place where we can return our deposit bottles that we collected over the past few weeks. They are not accepted in the supermarkets but in special bottle depots.

30 September

Today we want to discover Calgary. We take a bus to the centre and cross the Bow River, the very same river we saw in the Rockies three days ago. We return to the centre on the Peace Bridge and take a stroll through the Prince’s Island Park, located on a river isle. The combination of the skyscraper-dominated cityscape, the river and the autumnal trees has its appeal.

In town we drift through the streets, which are laid out in a grid with streets (St) and avenues (Ave). The number of skyscrapers is stunning. There are many with apartments, but it looks like the big ones with the mirrored façades seem to be mainly office buildings.

But of course there are other houses as well, sometimes contrasting with their modern siblings, sometimes just finding a small patch, where they stand like a dandelion on an asphalt road.

We enjoy our last dinner in the Taste of Yemen, where we get an incredible meal at more than reasonable prices. If I lived in Calgary, I would be a regular visitor there.

1 October

Time to fly home. After having the last breakfast, packing our belongings, taking the bus to the airport, leaving the baggage, waiting for the flight and then Annika and I leave Calgary, sitting side by side in the very last row of the aeroplane. I have set my clock forward eight hours to get back to Central European Summer Time again and try to sleep as much as possible. It is more than a series of naps. When I wake up for the umpteenth time, we are above the coast of Labrador. It is night and I cannot see any landscape, but I do see a faint green arc in the north. The first Northern Lights of the season.

A winter night with northern lights Mar 28 2026

When I returned to Tromsø two weeks ago a lot of snow had melted due to a warm and rainy period. Last weekend I took a rainy hike by the coast on the island Kvaløya, where it was free of snow and I saw the first flowering tussilago.

In the last few days it has become a bit colder and today’s precipitation came as snow, making the street white again, at least for a while.

At ten o’clock I went onto my balcony to look for Jupiter and the Moon I saw faint northern lights. Should I take a chance and try to take some photos? I grabbed my equipment, winter boots and a down jacket, took the car to the kindergarten, where a path leads to the ski runs and I went to the small pond. Luckily, the aurora was still present though not strong. I put the camera on a tripod and started taking pictures. The sky was slightly purple – was it the Moon, or what caused the colour? I do not know.

The aurora was quite low and weakened and reappeared several times. After half an hour it reappeared again, gained shape and movement – although it was not very bright.

Then it started to rise more and more …

… until it reached the zenith, where it slowly flickered back and forth for a while. Since I didn’t take my fisheye lens with me I didn’t take any more photos.

I had been standing there in the snow by the small pond for about 50 minutes. The down jacket I wore was warm enough but quite short and my legs were really freezing, although it was only around -4 °C. When the aurora weakened I went back to the car and drove home with a plan in mind: when the aurora was still present, I would change to my Canada Goose down parka and pants (the warmest clothes I have) and drive back. Anyhow, when I parked the car in front of the door of my apartment, the aurora was gone.

The sunset was too early Feb 15 2026

Today we had another clear morning with a temperature of -23 °C and not a single cloud. According to SMHI and The Photographer’s Ephemeris sunrise at our place in Obbola was at 07:32 today. While I was still walking on the sea ice to have a better view of the sunrise the sun already appeared – three minutes too early. The reason for this is atmospheric refraction due to an inversion above the ice that bends the light and so “lifts up” objects in the distance.

$Sunrise and atmospheric refraction$

To the right in the photo: The lighthouse Storbränningen, which I visited two days ago. It is about 4 km away. I could also spot the lighthouse Väktaren – 7 km away – although the distance to the horizon is technically only 4.5 km. I can even still see some construction far, far away on a bearing of 140° but I haven’t worked out what it is. Finland perhaps … ?

Soldagen 2026 Jan 21 2026

Although the sun has been above the horizon in Tromsø since 15 January, it always takes some days until it rises above the mountains south of the island. Today was the “official” soldagen, the “sun day” when the sun returns to Tromsø.

The first photos, however, I took today between 5:00 and 5:30. There was polar light all over the sky but when I reached a good spot it had already weakened. At least I took a photo of the trees covered in hoar frost – the result of a very foggy night two nights earlier.

Before lunchtime, I took an hour off and took the bus to Telegrafbukta in the southern part of Tromsøya. It is a good spot to welcome the sun after two months of absence. When I reached the beach I could already see the sunlit snowy mountains in the north. What a beauty!

I joined some winter swimmers and took a dip in the sea. Water temperature 3.9 °C and sorry—no photos. The sun had vanished behind a mountain but luckily came back and stayed for a while. That’s always a special moment and I was amongst hundreds of other people celebrating this hour of resurgence.

I look very overdressed with this heavy down parka considering it was only -6 °C, but I like to have it extra warm after a winter bath when waiting for the bus back to work.

With the sun, the days get longer and longer and even shortly before 16:00 the western sky was still glowing in warm colours. Fifteen minutes later I saw another aurora between the frosted trees.

Unfortunately the last photo is out of focus. When I realised it the aurora had already almost disappeared again. Often you have to be quick to take pictures of the northern lights.

End of polar night in Tromsø Jan 16 2026

Now the time of the polar night has ended in Tromsø. The sun rises above the horizon, though not above the mountains yet to be seen in town. This will take some other days.

Crisp and clear winter Jan 4 2026

After ten centimetres of snowfall, the sky cleared during the night and temperatures dropped. I woke up at one o’clock simply to see the full moon with a halo and Jupiter nearby. I resisted the urge to go back to bed and went outside to take a photo. What a beautiful sight, especially in combination with the wintry coast.

I also took some photos of the snow and the ice at the coast tonight. Nine hours later the sun managed to climb above the cloud layer that had gathered on the open sea. Time to take a photo of the same scene again.

I guess this is my favourite combination of winter weather: first snowfall and wind, then a clear sky and cold air. I took two other pictures from the same place. You can see the sunlit ice fog on the horizon, which forms when very cold air meets the open sea.

At noon my wife Annika and I took a promenade to the beach Vitskärsudden. The sea was still open, but a layer of ice had begun to form along the beach. The small harbour on the other side of the breakwater was covered with ice floes. When the sun is low ice and snow in the shadow often look blue, while in the sun they look orange.

Vitskärsudden – the beach starts to freeze-beach

13:52 – fifteen minutes before sunset – the landscape became even more colourful. We were back at our house in Obbola and I took some photos through the windows of the winter garden that were covered with frost. The temperature had dropped to -16 °C.

Now it is 17:37 and I sit writing this blog article. The temperature is now -20.4 °C. When you are outside at minus twenty degrees and inhale through your nose it tickles, because your nose hairs freeze. If you think that is cold, in Gielas in the Swedish mountains -40.7 °C were measured at 10 o’clock.

Tomorrow I will travel back to Tromsø. Then it will be a while before I see the sun again, as the polar night lasts until 15 January. It will also be less cold, but more snowy. At the moment there are 67 cm of snow there. And the great thing: winter has just begun!

Aaarr-wooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! Oct 3 2025

1st October Oct 1 2025

The 1st day of this year’s October delivers! First I got a clear, blue sky on my after-work hike through the autumnal forests on top of Tromsøya. Then I got beautiful Northern lights tonight, I just came in and developed the photos a bit.

What you don’t see here – as usual – is the movements of the Aurora. The live act is still better.

When the rain comes, look for the light Sep 19 2025

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