Word of mouth has done its bit to turn Ian Griffin’s annual flight south to see the southern lights into a must-do bucket list activity.
Each year, the avid astronomer and Otago Museum director hosts groups of people on a chartered Air New Zealand plane which travels towards the Antarctic in search of the aurora australis.
The most recent flight was last Friday night, when 270 people boarded a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in Christchurch for a 10-hour flight to see the magical natural phenomena.
Now the annual trip has become so popular Christchurch travel company Viva Expeditions has teamed up with Dr Griffin to commercialise the flight.
There will be two more flights in September this year, followed by another four next year.
Dr Griffin said the flights, in March and September, would take advantage of the equinox aurora effect, when there were 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.
In 2016, when the first aurora flight from Dunedin was planned by Dr Griffin, he said the ultimate aim was to make the flight a tourist attraction, by making it an annual flight people from around the globe could go on.
It now appears to have come to fruition, and then some.
"We’ve done five flights now and we’ve always seen decent auroras. So we’ve had a 100% hit rate."
He was delighted his initiative had been picked up and was becoming available to a wider audience.
"It’s interesting that something that is a passionate interest to me, is interesting to other people." Dr Griffin said Friday’s flight was "incredible".
"It was by far the best flight I have been on in terms of the variety of auroral forms we saw and the incredible dynamics of the ever changing display.
"I personally took more than 7000 photographs and am still going through them."
