Wolf-Shaped Northern Lights: Marja-Terttu Karlsson’s Pajala Photograph

First you see the green sweep of the northern lights. Then a pointed muzzle, an arched back and what looks remarkably like a wolf bounding across the sky above the trees. Marja-Terttu Karlsson took the photograph in Pajala, in Sweden’s far north, in December 2015, and it has travelled around the world ever since.

Marja-Terttu Karlsson and the wolf in the sky

Karlsson lives in Pajala, a small town of around 2,000 people in Norrbotten County, the northernmost county of Sweden. It lies at about 67°N in the Torne Valley, well north of the Arctic Circle, and is known in Sweden as the setting of Mikael Niemi’s novel Popular Music from Vittula. She photographed the aurora one night in mid-December 2015 and only spotted the animal when she loaded the pictures onto her computer. “I didn’t know when I photographed what I got. It was amazing,” she said.

“I thought, oh my God, it resembles a fox or a wolf or something,” she told Swedish public broadcaster SVT, which published the story on 19 December 2015. Read SVT’s interview.

Real photo: the before-and-after frames

The picture was shared thousands of times on Facebook within days, and SVT reported that it was the most shared image on Swedish social media that weekend, with more than 32,000 shares from SVT’s own site alone. Some people wrote to SVT and to Karlsson insisting it had to be fake. Her answer was simple: “They think it is fake, but I can assure all sceptics that it’s genuine.”

In a follow-up report on 21 December 2015, SVT published her unedited frames of the aurora taken before and after the wolf shape formed. “I don’t own Photoshop, and I don’t have any knowledge about editing. So it’s real,” Karlsson told the broadcaster.

How the northern lights form shapes

The aurora is created when electrons accelerated in Earth’s magnetosphere stream down along magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere. There they collide with oxygen and nitrogen, which release the energy as light, much like a neon tube. According to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the light typically forms 80 to 500 km above the ground.

The colour depends on the gas and the height:

• Green, the colour of Karlsson’s wolf, comes from atomic oxygen emitting at 557.7 nm in the lower part of the display.
• Red comes from atomic oxygen at the highest altitudes, emitting at 630 nm.
• Blue and purple come from nitrogen at the lowest altitudes, often along the lower edges of curtains during strong solar activity.

From the ground the light takes the form of glows, patches, curving arcs, striped rays, folded curtains and the overhead corona. These shapes can twist and fold within seconds. A camera freezes one moment of that movement, and our brains, which are wired to find faces and animals in random patterns, do the rest. In Karlsson’s frame, the upper curve reads as a back, the narrow projection on the right as a muzzle, and the dark treeline below sets the whole figure off.

Where and when to see the aurora

Auroras are most frequent in the auroral zone, a band about 6° wide centred on 67° latitude. Pajala, at 67°11′N, sits right in the middle of it. You need dark, clear skies, so the midnight sun rules out summer, and the season in Swedish Lapland runs from autumn to early spring. The most intense outbursts, known as substorms, happen mainly around midnight, and they are more common and brighter near the peak of the solar cycle.

Photographer’s tip: shoot a sequence, not a single frame. Like Karlsson’s before-and-after images, a series records how the display moved and makes a lucky shape easy to prove later.

For trip planning, start with our northern lights destination guide. For more aurora stories, see the Lofoten proposal photographed under the aurora and Horacio Llorens’s northern lights flight near Tromsø.

Sources