15 Northern Lights Hunting Spots in Denmark in 2026

Lars's farfar fished herring out of a small Jutland harbour for most of his working life, and in his generation a strange glow low on the northern horizon was read as weather and water information before it was ever treated as a celestial event. A greenish shimmer on a cold night sometimes meant the shoals were moving further out, and boats adjusted their nets by it. Whether that link between light and fish ever held up scientifically matters less than what it did to three generations of one family. Lars still glances north out of pure habit before he checks any forecast, and by the second week of our first winter together I had caught the same habit myself.

His farmor had her own rule, half joke and half genuine belief. A night when the lights danced hard was not a night to argue with family, because the old stories said the sky already carried enough restlessness without people adding to it from the ground. She also told Lars, when he was small, that the lights were the spirits of fishermen lost at sea, still working their nets in a brighter water somewhere above the clouds, which is a version of the same old European folk idea about the aurora being the souls of the dead, dressed in a distinctly Jutland accent. I am not asking anyone to adopt Danish sky superstition. I am telling you that chasing the aurora in this country came wrapped in a kind of inherited patience and quiet respect I never expected, and it shaped the pace of every single night on this list, from the first cold hour of waiting to the last.

Food became part of the ritual too. Lars always packed rugbrod sandwiches with pickled herring and a hard boiled egg, the same combination his mother packed for winter fishing trips decades earlier, and a flask of gloegg on the coldest nights, sometimes with a small bottle of snaps kept strictly for after midnight. Waiting for a storm to arrive, we ate the way his family had always eaten while waiting for anything uncertain, slowly and without much talking, which turned out to be its own kind of comfort.

Lars, wrapped in two coats on the Thy coast at eleven at night: The tourists want a guarantee. My farfar never got one either. He got a good coat, a flask, and patience.

1 Grenen Beach and Kjul Strand

Both sit within a thirty minute drive of each other near Skagen and Hirtshals, about a five hour drive from Copenhagen or a short flight to Aalborg followed by an hour on the road. Guesthouses in Skagen run from budget to fairly upscale depending on season, and we camped one night on a friend of Lars's land near Hirtshals for almost nothing.

What we saw: a strong, unmistakable, moving aurora on the night of the tenth of May 2024, during the severe geomagnetic storm that lit up skies across the whole of Europe. Best time from here: late September to early April, after full darkness, watching the northern horizon over open water.

We drove up from Aalborg on a whim after Lars checked a storm watch three times in one afternoon and finally said, simply, tonight. Grenen is the sandy spit where the Skagerrak and Kattegat currents visibly collide, and locals will happily walk you to the exact line where the two waters meet and refuse to blend. We reached it a little after eleven, timing our walk with low tide, because the packed wet sand turns into a mirror and doubles any glow into something far more dramatic than the sky alone offers. Skagen's painters chased a different kind of light here more than a century ago, and the famous blue evening tone they captured still sells as small prints in half the shops in town, something Lars pointed out with real local pride, as though the painters had been early aurora chasers themselves, just with brushes instead of phones.

The colour built slowly, a pale band low on the horizon that thickened and then genuinely moved, curtains folding over each other in a way no earlier trip had prepared me for. Lars went quiet in a way I had learned to read as the highest compliment he gave a night sky. We stayed until nearly three, ate the last of the rugbrod sandwiches sitting directly on the cold sand, and drove the twenty minutes to Kjul Strand near Hirtshals afterward simply because neither of us wanted the night to end. There, on a beach mostly known locally as the spot where teenagers watch the Norway ferry lights slide past, we found the display still going, fainter now but present, and shared it with two local fishermen checking crab pots who ended up staying an extra hour, trading stories about storms their own fathers remembered from decades back. We slept two hours in the car afterward, cold and completely satisfied, and that mix of exhaustion and disbelief is the closest thing to a life changing travel moment either of us has had.

2 Hanstholm and Nationalpark Thy

Around forty minutes apart near Thisted. Camping sites and simple nature cabins sit inside and around the national park, generally priced well below city hotels, and Hanstholm has a handful of harbourside rooms. A car is close to essential here.

What we saw: nothing beyond stars on both nights we tried, once due to low cloud rolling in off the Skagerrak and once because no storm was active at all. Best time from here: check a storm watch before committing, since this stretch rewards a targeted trip on an active night far more than a routine one.

We camped for two nights inside Nationalpark Thy, Denmark's first national park and genuinely one of its darkest inland stretches once you get past the entrance campsites. Lars insisted we pitch the tent further in, toward the dune plantation near Stenbjerg, since the pine treeline cuts both wind and stray light. Lying flat on cold sand at midnight, he told me something older locals in his family used to say, that the shifting Thy dunes themselves seemed to glow faintly pale under a strong aurora, simply because the sand reflects far more light than the dark heather further inland. We had no storm to test the theory against either night, only a wide, star crowded sky and the kind of silence that made both of us talk more than usual, trading childhood stories instead of watching for green light that never came.

On our second evening we drove out to Hanstholm, where fishermen still talk about the old foghorn station on the headland, and Lars's cousin, who works the harbour, walked us to the breakwater at its northern end, away from the trawler lights, calling it the clearest patch of open sky in town. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that he had once watched the sky turn faintly red rather than green from that same spot years earlier, a colour rare enough here that people still bring it up at family dinners. We got no colour of any kind that night, only a cold wind and a low bank of cloud that never lifted, which is the more common and more honest outcome of chasing this particular sky, and Lars's cousin cooked us fried plaice back at his house afterward as a consolation that felt like the actual highlight of the evening.

3 Løkken Beach

About thirty minutes from Aalborg by car. Summer cottages can be rented cheaply once the peak season crowds leave in autumn.

What we saw: a faint, pale green glow, visible to the naked eye but confirmed properly only once we checked a long exposure photo, on an ordinary moderate activity night unrelated to any named storm. Best time from here: a Kp index of five or above combined with a genuinely clear night, checked an hour or two before you commit to going.

Lars grew up visiting a family beach hut here, one of the rows of small, colourful huts along the dunes that cut the wind from the south and frame a flat, unobstructed view north over the water, and he knew exactly which gap between two huts lined up best with true north. We spent a long, quiet night wedged into that gap, drinking gloegg from a flask and eating æbleskiver his aunt had made that afternoon, dusted in sugar and still faintly warm in their tin. Nothing happened for two hours. Lars filled the silence with a story his aunt tells every winter, about a fisherman from Løkken who was supposedly guided home through fog by a strange light in the sky, a story that sounds suspiciously like every coastal town in Denmark claims some version of the same tale, and I told him so, which made him laugh for the first time all night.

A faint curtain of pale green finally lifted off the horizon a little after one in the morning, so subtle that I only trusted it once the camera confirmed what my eyes half suspected. It was not the sky moving so much as breathing, a slow brightening and fading that lasted maybe twenty minutes. We did not call anyone or take many photos. We just sat with it, sugar still on our fingers, and Lars said quietly that this was closer to what most nights actually look like than the storm we had seen at Grenen, and that people should know that before they come chasing something rarer than what usually shows up.

4 Hvide Sande and Blåvand

About seventy minutes apart along the west coast, roughly two and a half hours from Aarhus. Harbourside apartments in Hvide Sande and holiday cottages around Blåvand are common and reasonably priced outside summer.

What we saw: nothing at Hvide Sande, where sea fog rolled in within an hour and never lifted, and a faint, low aurora arc at Blåvand the following night once we drove south chasing a clearer forecast. Best time from here: Blåvand's flat horizon makes even a weak aurora easier to spot than at more sheltered spots, so treat it as your fallback if the Hvide Sande fog beats you.

Hvide Sande is a working fishing harbour town split by a canal, where locals discuss the sky the way people elsewhere discuss football scores, and the owner of a small surf shop near the canal sent us to the sluice gates, away from the harbour's working lights, since the town has quietly become a hub for kitesurfers who are already outside after dark checking wind and sky together. We stood there for a long, wind whipped hour as fog thickened around us until the lighthouse itself was barely visible, ordering nothing more from the sky than the sound of it. Lars, refusing to waste a clear forecast entirely, suggested we simply drive south, and an hour later we were setting up camp chairs against a sunken, tilted WWII bunker on the beach at Blåvand, half buried in sand, a spot locals use as an informal wind shelter while sky watching.

We shared a thermos of coffee and the last of some smoked herring bought earlier that day, and somewhere past midnight a faint aurora arc appeared so low and pale over the flat, curved horizon that I would have dismissed it as cloud if Lars had not immediately gone quiet. We stayed until the cold became genuinely uncomfortable, packed the bunker's sand off our coats, and drove back toward Esbjerg trading the kind of half asleep conversation that only happens after a night like that, about nothing in particular and everything that mattered.

5 Silkeborg Lake District and Voldum

Around fifty minutes apart in central Jutland, both reachable within ninety minutes of Aarhus by car. Lakeside cabins near Silkeborg are common and mid range, while Voldum has no formal accommodation, so most visitors base themselves in Randers.

What we saw: a faint, reflected glow on the Silkeborg lakes on one moderate activity night, and a genuine, if brief, pale curtain over the fields near Voldum on a separate night when the coast was clouded out and this inland gap in the weather was not. Best time from here: useful as a backup plan when coastal cloud ruins your primary spot, since inland weather patterns here can differ completely from the coast the same evening.

Silkeborg surprised me the most of anywhere on this list. It is inland, forested and full of lakes, which sounds like the opposite of ideal sky watching terrain, but Lars argued that on a strong storm night the aurora sits high enough overhead that treeline stops mattering, and the still lake water gives a mirror image no coastal wave can match. We camped by the shore near Himmelbjerget, Denmark's so called sky mountain, a modest hill by any international standard but treated locally with genuine reverence, and cooked sausages over a small fire while waiting. A faint green band eventually crossed the water, doubled by reflection into something that felt larger than the sky alone could have offered, and Lars told me his father used to bring him here as a boy specifically to teach him patience, using the lake and its slow reflections as the lesson itself.

Voldum, a small farming village with no business appearing on any sky watching list, came into our route almost by accident. Lars's family has land near here, and on a night when the entire coast was clouded over according to every forecast we checked, this single inland gap remained clear. We stood in a stubble field at midnight in gum boots borrowed from Lars's uncle, sharing a flask of snaps against the cold, and watched a pale curtain rise briefly over farmland that had never once appeared in anything either of us had read about Denmark and the aurora. Lars's uncle joined us for twenty minutes in his own boots, said very little, and went back inside once the display faded, treating the whole thing with the same unbothered calm his family seems to bring to every strange thing the sky does.

6 Gjerrild Nordstrand

Around forty minutes from Grenaa by car, on the Djursland coast. Camping grounds nearby are inexpensive and popular with Danish families in summer, quiet the rest of the year.

What we saw: stars only, no aurora, on a clear but solar quiet night. Best time from here: this beach faces almost directly north across the Kattegat toward Anholt, which makes it a strong candidate on any confirmed storm night, even though our own visit landed on a quiet one.

We timed this trip for the tenth of November on purpose, because Lars refused to spend Mortensaften anywhere but somewhere he could still cook a proper duck dinner over an open fire, in keeping with the old Saint Martin's tradition his family, like most Danish families, treats as a genuine yearly fixture. We roasted a small duck on a spit over driftwood on the beach, badly, laughing most of the way through it, while a Danish family camping further down the shore shared their own considerably better version and their own gløgg in return. Lars had camped here as a teenager, and returning as an adult he pointed out the exact dune where his family used to pitch a tent every August, now grown taller with marram grass than either of us remembered.

Between the duck and the fire, an older man from the neighbouring tent walked over to ask if we were watching for the lights, and once we admitted we were, he told us about a night decades earlier when he was a boy and the whole Djursland coast reportedly turned faintly red for a few minutes, an event his own mother talked about for the rest of her life and that he had never fully believed until the 2024 storm made national news and put every old family story like his back into circulation. Lars had heard a similar tale from a cousin, about lights over this exact water being teased about for years until that same 2024 night made the whole family reconsider whether any of it had been true after all. Our own night gave us nothing beyond an exceptionally clear, star heavy sky and a fire that refused to cook the duck evenly, which after four winters of this had stopped feeling like a failure and started feeling like simply another kind of night worth having.

7 Moen Island

About two hours from Copenhagen by car, or bus and local connections. Farm stays and small guesthouses near the cliffs are moderately priced.

What we saw: stars only, no storm underway that night, though the darkness itself was some of the best of the entire trip. Best time from here: Moen's certified dark sky status makes it one of the most reliable spots for even a faint aurora whenever a storm watch is issued, regardless of season.

Moen, together with the neighbouring islet of Nyord, holds the distinction of being the Nordic region's first officially certified International Dark Sky Park, and the island leans into that status properly, with local astronomy volunteers occasionally running informal open evenings near the visitor centre where anyone can look through a proper telescope for free. We happened to arrive on the second of February, close enough to Kyndelmisse, the old Danish candle festival marking the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring, that the small church in the nearest village had candles burning in every window when we drove past, a quiet, pre-Christian sense of the darkness finally turning that Lars said felt oddly appropriate for a night spent staring at an equally dark sky waiting for it to do something.

We camped a short walk from the chalk cliffs, and the certified darkness meant the stars alone felt closer and more numerous than anywhere else on the route, the Milky Way genuinely visible as a band rather than a smudge for the first time on the whole trip. Lars told me a story his mother used to tell about a woman said to walk the cliff edge on foggy nights looking for a boat that never returned, one of a dozen versions of the same grieving ghost story you hear along almost every Danish coastline, retold with a slightly different name and cliff each time depending on which grandmother is telling it. No aurora appeared that night, only the sea audible somewhere below us in total darkness, and Lars admitted this was the one stop where he felt genuinely nervous walking near the edge, certification or not, which told me more about the place than any description could.

8 Bornholm Island

Reached by ferry from Ystad in Sweden or a short flight from Copenhagen. Ronne has a full range of hotels, with quieter guesthouses further from town.

What we saw: a faint, confirmed glow outlining the horizon on a moderate activity night. Best time from here: the granite coastline near Hammershus stays dark enough that even a modest storm is worth the ferry crossing.

Out in the Baltic and closer to Sweden and Poland than to Copenhagen, Bornholm has a completely different character from the rest of Denmark, shaped by genuine Viking Age history rather than borrowed atmosphere. The island holds some of the country's best known rune stones, and the guesthouse owner we stayed with outside Ronne spent a full breakfast explaining how her own grandfather used to read the winter sky the way older generations here read those stones, treating any unusual light as something worth remembering and retelling rather than something to explain away. She also mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Bornholm had its own small flurry of aurora sightings during the January 2026 storm, photographed from the northern cliffs near Hammeren by locals who then spent weeks comparing notes at the harbour cafe about whose photograph came out best.

We spent our own night among the ruined walls of Hammershus fortress, where centuries of stonework stood outlined against a faint green sky that built slowly after midnight, cooking coffee on a small stove tucked into a gap in the old fortifications to stay out of the wind. Lars, never short of a local legend, told me the fortress is supposedly haunted by a former commandant who refuses to leave his post, a story every guide on the island seems to tell slightly differently, some insisting he still lights a lantern on the darkest nights of the year. Standing among the ruins with a real aurora glow behind them, faint as it was, felt less like ticking off a location and more like watching two different kinds of history happen at once, one measured in centuries and one in minutes.

9 Samso Island

A ferry from Hou or Kalundborg, both under two hours. Farm stays and small inns are common and generally affordable.

What we saw: a faint, brief glow low on the horizon, confirmed by camera, on a moderate activity night. Best time from here: the island's quiet interior roads, away from the small ferry town, give the darkest and most reliable views.

We caught the last ferry over on the first Friday of November, which happens to be J-dag, the day Danish breweries traditionally launch their Christmas beer, and even on a small island like Samso the local pub had a queue out the door at exactly nine in the evening for the first round. Known nationally as Denmark's renewable energy island, Samso's wind turbines make an odd but oddly fitting backdrop for night sky watching, their slow blinking lights almost keeping time with whatever the sky is doing, and after our own quieter Christmas beer at the pub we drove out to the island's dark interior roads well after midnight.

We stayed at a small farm guesthouse, and the farmer himself, once he heard why two strangers were parked on his lane after dark, walked out to join us for twenty minutes just to see if the night would deliver anything. It eventually did, a faint smear of green low over the fields that lasted only a few minutes, and he told us, half joking, that his grandmother always said a quiet aurora meant a mild winter ahead, a piece of weather folklore neither of us could verify but both of us liked far too much to argue with. He also remembered, more seriously, driving his own children out to this same lane during the May 2024 storm two years earlier, describing it as the one night the entire island seemed to be standing outside at the same time, phones up, engines running for warmth, nobody minding the cold.

10 Anholt Island

A ferry from Grenaa takes around three hours, running up to twice daily, and seat reservations are required. Because the return sailing is usually the next day, plan for at least one overnight stay at one of the island's small guesthouses or the campsite near the harbour.

What we saw: a strong, confirmed aurora during the January 2026 geomagnetic storm, one of the most talked about sightings of that particular winter. Best time from here: any confirmed storm watch, given Anholt's certified darkness and near total absence of artificial light across its interior.

This was the stop Lars was most excited about from the very start of planning. Anholt, sitting alone in the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden, became Denmark's fourth certified International Dark Sky Park in 2025, after years of residents swapping streetlights for dark sky compliant fixtures. Its interior desert area, one of the largest of its kind in northern Europe, stays completely unlit by community agreement. With barely a hundred and fifty year round residents and only a few kilometres of paved road, most people get around on foot or rented bike, which somehow makes the whole island feel built for exactly this kind of waiting. We stayed two nights in a small rented room near the harbour for one clear window, eating fish soup at the island's only real restaurant while we waited out the first cloudy evening.

On the second night, in the middle of that unlit desert with nothing but sand, scrub and sky in every direction, the storm arrived properly. It was the most complete display of the whole trip after Grenen, a full sweep of moving colour with no artificial light anywhere near us to compete with it. Lars did not say much, which by then I understood meant everything. We stayed until nearly dawn, missed the first ferry back entirely, and neither of us minded even slightly.

11 Enoe Island and Bisserup Strand

Enoe is connected to the mainland near Karrebaeksminde by a causeway, about twenty minutes from Naestved. Bisserup Strand sits roughly forty minutes further along Zealand's south coast. Neither has hotels of its own, so most visitors stay in Naestved and drive out for the evening.

What we saw: nothing at Enoe beyond stars, and a very faint smudge of green at Bisserup later the same night that neither of us fully trusted until reviewing photos afterward. Best time from here: both are minor spots best treated as a quiet, low pressure stop on a longer south Zealand trip rather than a primary destination.

Enoe is tiny and barely registers on most maps, flat, unglamorous and quiet in a way that suited us after ten at night. Lars's uncle keeps a small boat moored nearby, and it was his passing comment, months earlier, about a strange light over the water one winter years back that first put Enoe on our route at all. He had apparently mentioned it so many times over the years at family dinners that Lars's aunt used to tease him for turning a single foggy memory into a full length ghost story, complete with a version where the light supposedly followed his boat halfway back to the harbour, a detail Lars suspects was added sometime around the fifth retelling.

Our own night there gave us nothing but a wide, undisturbed sky, so we drove on to Bisserup Strand, a small, sleepy harbour village Lars knew only because a distant relative keeps a boat there too. We sat on the end of the small pier with our legs hanging over cold water, sharing the last of a bag of licorice Lars never travels without, and it was here, on a night with only the faintest smudge of green ever appearing low on the horizon, that Lars told me about his own first sighting as a child, sitting on this exact pier with his father thirty years earlier. He described it slowly, the way people describe things they have turned over in their memory for decades, his father waking him well past bedtime just to see it, and admitted it is the one memory he still measures every other sighting against, including the storm we would later see together on Anholt.

12 The Faroe Islands

Reached by direct flight from Copenhagen to Vagar, roughly two hours, or a longer ferry crossing from Hirtshals. Torshavn has a full range of hotels and guesthouses, with smaller villages offering simple rooms and self catering cottages.

What we saw: a full, moving, unmistakably green curtain overhead, on an entirely ordinary moderate activity night, not tied to any named storm. Best time from here: roughly late September to early April, and unlike the mainland, a moderate rather than exceptional storm is often enough given the latitude.

Technically an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark rather than the mainland, the Faroe Islands are as much a part of this country as Skagen or Copenhagen, and I am including them here in the same numbered list as everywhere else for exactly that reason. Starting from Torshavn, we drove out toward Vidareidi, the northernmost settlement on the island of Vidoy, on a still, windless night that locals told us was rarer here than the lights themselves. We stayed in a small self catering cottage and ate fresh cod the owner had caught that same morning, and over dinner she told us a story about the huldufolk, the hidden people her own grandmother swore lived in the hills above the village and occasionally borrowed sheep, a Faroese folk belief far older and more widely told than anything either of us had heard on the Danish mainland.

Kalsoy, reached by a short ferry the next afternoon, added an extra layer of quiet that the mainland simply cannot offer. That night, without any major storm forecast at all, just an ordinary moderate reading, a full, moving, unmistakably green curtain rose overhead and stayed for the better part of an hour. After months of pale smudges and near misses across the rest of Denmark, watching it properly here, with Lars laughing out loud for the first time in four winters of otherwise quiet nights, felt like the actual point of everything that came before it.

13 Tisvilde Strand and Gilleleje

About fifteen minutes apart on north Zealand's coast, both around an hour to ninety minutes from Copenhagen by car or train. Holiday cottages near Tisvilde and guesthouses in Gilleleje cover most budgets.

What we saw: a strong, sustained display at Tisvilde on the night of the twenty seventh of February 2023, tied to a real storm widely photographed further along this same coast at Hornbaek, and nothing at Gilleleje an hour later once a local cloud bank rolled in. Best time from here: this stretch of north Zealand coast is genuinely one of the country's best documented aurora corridors, but microclimate cloud can vary from one beach to the next on the same night.

Tisvilde's wide beach and the neighbouring Tisvilde Hegn forest give both open sky and shelter depending on which way the wind is blowing, and this exact stretch of coast sits close to where some of the country's most widely photographed aurora displays have actually occurred during major storms. We arrived expecting a quiet warm up stop and ended up staying past three in the morning, wrapped in every layer we owned, sharing a thermos of coffee and trading childhood stories neither of us usually told, because the display that night simply refused to fade. It was the second strongest sighting of the whole four years, behind only Anholt.

Buoyed by that, we drove the short distance to Gilleleje afterward, a working harbour town busy with its fish market by day and nearly silent by night, where the breakwater east of the harbour gives a clean view across the Kattegat away from the market stalls and fishing boats' deck lights. A bank of cloud had rolled in from the sea in the time it took us to drive there, and we got nothing, standing on cold stone eating smoked fish bought earlier that day while Lars told me his own grandfather used to mend nets on that exact stretch of harbour wall decades before either of us thought to look up from it. The contrast between the two nights, fifteen minutes apart, taught me more about how local this phenomenon really is than anything else on the whole trip.

14 Kongskilde

Near Sorø, about an hour from Copenhagen by car. No accommodation on site, best visited as an evening trip from Sorø or Slagelse.

What we saw: stars only, on a quiet, storm free night. Best time from here: an unusual inland candidate worth trying only when a storm watch is active elsewhere in the country and you want a low pressure, easily reached alternative near Copenhagen.

An inland nature reserve of heathland and small lakes, an unusual inclusion on any aurora list, and one Lars only trusted after someone he knew who lives nearby mentioned a genuine sighting there during a past storm, describing a faint band of colour reflected in one of the reserve's small lakes that lasted only minutes but stayed with him long enough to bring it up again unprompted years later. We arrived in late December, close enough to the winter solstice that a small local bonfire gathering was still being cleared away near the car park, one of the newer, non religious solstice celebrations that have grown across Danish municipalities over the last few decades, built around exactly the same instinct that sends people like us out into a dark field at midnight, a stubborn refusal to let the year's longest nights pass unmarked.

We walked the heath at night, away from any water or coastline at all, carrying a small stove to make coffee halfway through, and Lars used the quiet to tell me about a local legend of a bridal party that supposedly vanished on the heath centuries ago, a story so vague and widely varied depending on who tells it that neither of us could say whether it was true folklore or something invented more recently for visitors. No lights appeared for us, only an exceptionally quiet, star filled sky, and the walk itself, entirely wordless for the last half hour, ended up being one of the more memorable nights of the whole trip regardless, less because of anything we saw and more because of how completely the cold and the dark had emptied both of our heads by the end of it.

15 Amager Faelled and Nordhavnstippen

Both inside Copenhagen, reachable by metro or bike in under twenty minutes from the city centre. No accommodation needed if you are already staying in the capital.

What we saw: nothing at Amager Faelled, where city glow washed out any faint activity despite an active storm watch that same night, and a faint, genuine glow at Nordhavnstippen a few hours later once humidity dropped and the sky cleared further. Best time from here: Nordhavnstippen's open water views tend to outperform Amager Faelled on marginal nights, simply because it sits slightly further from the densest part of the city.

Yes, inside Copenhagen. Amager Faelled, a wetland nature reserve on the edge of the capital, will never rival a Faroese cliff for darkness, but during severe storms aurora activity has been reported over the wider Copenhagen area itself, and local astronomy groups in the city keep an informal phone chain going whenever a storm watch is issued, the kind of quietly organised enthusiasm you would not expect from a capital city until you have seen how seriously Danes take their handful of clear winter nights. We tried it on a night with a genuine storm watch in effect, eating hot dogs from a stand near the metro station beforehand the way Lars insisted was mandatory, and the open marshland gave us nothing beyond a slightly brighter patch of sky that could just as easily have been the airport.

Lars, unwilling to waste a confirmed storm entirely, suggested Nordhavnstippen, a reclaimed harbour headland popular with local joggers and dog walkers, several of whom, he told me, have ended up with genuinely striking phone photographs over the Oresund strait purely by accident during past storms, never having gone out looking for anything more than an evening walk. A few hours later, once the humidity dropped and the haze thinned, a faint glow genuinely appeared over the water, confirmed by camera even if barely visible to the eye. It made a fitting last stop on this whole route, a quiet reminder that even the most ordinary evening walk in the busiest part of the country can turn into something worth remembering if the timing happens to be right, and that four winters of chasing something rare had ended, appropriately enough, on the most unremarkable looking headland of the entire trip.