Also, a citizen science website called Aurorasaurus gives on-the-ground instant information from aurora enthusiasts wanting to alert the community to new sky shows.Īnd you can have an aurora experience without even leaving your house if you so choose. You can get an idea of how active the northern lights are likely to be in your area by keeping tabs on a short-term aurora forecast, such as the one provided by the Geophysical Institute. One predicting only the next half hour is available on NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Website. The aurora is a sporadic phenomenon, occurring randomly for short periods or perhaps not at all." "Active periods are typically about 30 minutes long, and occur every two hours, if the activity is high. local time, although an active period can occur anytime during the dark hours," Deehr wrote in the guide. "Dress warmly, plan to watch the sky between 10 p.m. Ideally, time your trip to coincide with the new moon, and make sure to get away from city lights when it's time to look up, he added. Winter and springtime are generally less cloudy than autumn in and around the northern auroral zone, so a trip between December and April makes sense. You also want clear, dark skies, emphasizes Charles Deehr, a professor emeritus and aurora forecaster at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute, whose guide to aurora viewing has lots of great information. Solar forecasters are seeing upticks in active regions as well as in the coronal mass ejections of charged particles that are key to lighting up the northern lights. "The outlook is favorable as we go forward," Steenburgh said of 2021. The sun goes through an 11-year cycle of activity and much of 2021 has been quiet as we're just at the low end of the cycle. International overseas destinations might be closed due to local quarantine protocols, sometimes suddenly, so check guidance carefully before you go.Īnother factor you may want to check is how active the sun is during a particular year.
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Waiting might be a good time anyway, as summer 2021 is still a difficult time for international travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You need darkness to see the northern lights, and places in the auroral zone have precious little of it during the summer months. If you're planning an aurora-viewing trip, try not to schedule it in the middle of summer. See how the northern lights work in this infographic. The northern lights are more formally known as auroras, and are caused by interactions between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic field.