About · since February 2016
Night Sky Archive started on a fell top on 16 February 2016, when a snowmobile guide, a physics teacher and a nurse ended up sharing coffee under a Kp 6 aurora. We have been photographing the Lapland sky together ever since, and this site is where we keep the results.
We live in three different towns and meet up whenever the forecast and our shifts allow. Each of us has a speciality, and each of us is the worst at something.
Sodankylä · deep-sky, the Moon, the shed
Teaches physics and mathematics at the school in Sodankylä. Built the roll-off shed in her back yard in 2025 with a concrete pier that the frost has already tried to move. Wrote the little script that draws the plates on this site. Worst at: going to bed.
Inari · aurora, landscapes, star trails
Snowmobile and husky-trail guide in winter, forest work in summer. Knows every lay-by between Kemijärvi and Utsjoki that faces north, and most of the reindeer herders who own the land around them. Drives. Worst at: remembering where he put his mittens.
Rovaniemi · planets, comets, processing
Night-shift nurse at the central hospital, which turns out to be perfect training for staying awake until four in the morning. Owns the Celestron, does most of the final processing, and is the reason our colours look natural. Worst at: deciding when an image is finished.
Every session goes into a shared logbook: date, place, coordinates, start and end times, sky conditions, temperature, Kp, sky quality and who was there. Raw files go onto two mirrored drives in Aino’s house and a third that lives at Joonas’s. Ten seasons have added up to 21.4 terabytes, most of it frames of aurora that look almost exactly alike.
Once a capture is processed and we all agree it is honest, it gets a plate on this site. The plates are deliberately small vector drawings rather than full photographs: they load instantly on a weak cabin connection and they keep the site light enough to maintain in our spare time. Full-resolution files are available on request.
We are not professionals and we do not sell tours. We are happy to answer questions about places, settings and processing, and we especially like hearing from teachers and astronomy clubs.
Timeline
Unless a page says otherwise, the images and text on this site are © the individual photographer and are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0).
In plain words: you may share and adapt our work for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the photographer and Night Sky Archive, and link back to this site where you can. A good credit looks like this:
Photo: Aino Laaksonen / Night Sky Archive (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Schools, libraries, astronomy clubs and nature centres are welcome to use the images in teaching and exhibitions. For commercial use — prints, tourism marketing, book covers, stock — please ask first. We usually say yes, and the fee goes to the shed fund.
Write to us at hello@nightskyarchive.xyz. All three of us read that inbox, usually at weekends, so give us a few days.
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics or advertising, and loads nothing from any other website — no web fonts, no embedded maps or videos, no social buttons. Fonts come from your own device, and the starfield, plates and Moon calculations are all produced by your browser from the files on this site.
We do not have accounts, forms or newsletters. If you email us, we use your address only to reply, and we delete the conversation once it is finished unless you ask us to keep in touch.
Hand-written HTML, one stylesheet and one small script, edited in a text editor during the light summer months. Headings use your system’s geometric sans-serif; observation data is set in your system’s monospace font.
The starfield at the top of each page is generated from a fixed seed, so you see the same stars on every visit. The one on the front page uses 160216 — the night we met.
Thanks to the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory for decades of public magnetometer data, and to everyone who has ever switched their head torch to red.