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Social media users have Reykjavik to thank for awesome northern lights

NEW YORK — Reykjavik went dark on Wednesday night (Sept 28), after the City Council switched off street lamps and encouraged residents to turn off their lights.

Northern lights illuminate the sky on Lofoten Islands, Arctic Circle, on March 14, 2016. Photo: AFP

Northern lights illuminate the sky on Lofoten Islands, Arctic Circle, on March 14, 2016. Photo: AFP

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NEW YORK — Lights off. Lights on.

Reykjavik went dark on Wednesday night (Sept 28), after the City Council switched off street lamps and encouraged residents to turn off their lights.

The goal: To get light pollution to a minimum to provide the best possible viewing conditions for a particularly intense display of the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights.

According to the Icelandic Met Office’s website, which offers a daily forecast for the northern lights, seeing the aurora borealis “requires dark and partly clear skies”.

The lights had been predicted to appear around 9 or 10pm, so the city had sought to impose the blackout for an hour, starting at 10pm. But the show was slow to start, and the lights were kept off until midnight.

Tourists and residents posted stunning images on social media.

“The lights were really strong in the last two nights. It was unbelievable,” said Mr Florian Schade, 18, from Hamburg, Germany, who has been living in Iceland for two months and working at a bed-and-breakfast in Keflavik, in the south.

Mr Schade took his photographs, which he posted on Instagram, on Wednesday night at a parking lot.

The northern lights, which are produced when electrically charged particles from the sun that enter the Earth’s atmosphere collide, have been vivid in Iceland for several days. NEW YORK TIMES

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