An illuminated paraglider wing hangs beneath a sweep of green light. The pilot looks tiny against the sky, and that difference in scale is the heart of Horacio Llorens’s memorable northern lights flight near Tromsø, Norway.
Horacio Llorens’s night flight in Norway
Red Bull released the film on 27 January 2016. Its production account identifies Llorens, a Spanish acrobatic paraglider pilot, using a paramotor to launch from flat ground in sub-zero conditions near Tromsø.
The motor is a useful detail. Powered paragliding adds propulsion to the wing-and-harness setup, so this scene should not be read as an ordinary unpowered launch from a mountainside. The original account also describes specialist clothing, including heated gloves, used for the cold conditions.
The film was directed by Frode Sandbech, with Matt Pain as co-director and editor. Those credits help put the finished image in context: this was an organised aerial film production involving a pilot and a camera team.
How far away were the northern lights?
The flight takes place beneath the aurora. Llorens is not flying through the luminous curtains, however close the composition might make them seem. NOAA places typical auroral light at roughly 80–500 kilometres above Earth, far beyond the height of a paramotor flight.
The photograph aligns a nearby wing and pilot with a luminous background far higher in the atmosphere. Their overlap can make the distance hard to judge, especially when darkness removes other references. The scene does not show a flight through the aurora. Its appeal comes from bringing a recognisable human activity beneath a much larger display, with the camera joining two separate scales in one frame.
Why the small wing makes such a strong picture
The wing supplies a clean curve and a recognisable human activity in a sky that otherwise has very few clues to size. Its cooler illumination stands apart from the green glow, helping your eye find the pilot before exploring the larger pattern above.
That is a useful idea even for photographs made with both feet on the ground. A tree, a building or a person standing in an appropriate place can give a night sky a point of reference. Our story about the wolf-shaped aurora in Sweden shows how strongly a familiar shape can influence the way we read the lights.
Night flying and powered paragliding require specialist training, planning and compliance with local aviation rules. A short film cannot show enough to serve as a flight plan or equipment checklist. The production’s cold-weather clothing is part of its story, not a recipe for recreating it.
You can enjoy the northern lights without leaving the ground. Start with our aurora viewing guide for the role of darkness, weather and location. The sky can provide quite enough adventure on its own.
The apparent closeness is part of the photograph’s illusion
Try reading the flight image from near to far. The illuminated wing gives a clear outline, the pilot supplies a familiar human presence, and the auroral band occupies the more distant sky. None of those apparent sizes is a direct measure of the others. The arrangement demonstrates a photographic principle that also works from the ground: a small nearby subject can give a vast background a point of entry. The equipment and flight belong to Llorens's specialised production, while that visual relationship is available to any viewer studying the finished scene.
The pilot gives the scene scale without providing a ruler for the distant display. In a photograph, a nearby small object can appear comparable in size to a much larger distant feature. That relationship is what makes the scene so striking: recognisable equipment and a human figure remain tiny against the apparent sweep overhead.
This was a specialised flight and film production associated with Horacio Llorens. The finished sequence cannot show every operational decision, ground arrangement or weather assessment. Its strongest lesson for an ordinary viewer is photographic: a clearly recognisable foreground subject can make an enormous night sky feel more tangible, even when the two are separated by a great distance.
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- Red Bull
- Life Buzz
- The World at Night with Clear Skies and No Light Pollution
- You’ll Never Look at the Night Sky in the Same Way
- A Man Filmed Heaven For 7 Days. What He Saw Took My Breath Away.
- After Taking These Shots, The Photographer Quit His Job. One Look And You’ll See Why… Wow.
- In These Award Winning Photographs You FEEL The Power Of The Mountains.
- Stunning Finland Night Photography by Mikko Lagerstedt
- Original image link
- NOAA places typical auroral light at roughly 80–500 kilometres above Earth
- the wolf-shaped aurora in Sweden
- our aurora viewing guide
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