Auroral Displays

The aurora occurs along ring shaped regions around the north and south geomagnetic poles. The intensity of the displays vary from night to night and throughout each night.

An intense auroral display can cause many problems on the ground, such as intense electric currents along electric power lines (causing blackouts) and oil pipelines (enhancing corrosion). The aurora can disturb the ionosphere and disrupt short wave communication. Auroral discharge electrons have even damaged the electronics and solar panels of communications and meteorological satellites, rendering them inoperable.

Because of this, a major cooperative research program, the National Space Weather Program, studies these effects in an attempt to improve the prediction of intense auroral disturbances.

Best Aurora Viewing

The aurora is most active late at night or early in the morning, when the sky is clear and the air chilly. The best time to watch is in spring and fall, especially February, March, September, and October. One of the best times to look for the Northern Lights will be when it is dark because of a new moon.

Hardy Alaskans like to put on their parkas and lie on their backs in the snow to watch. The best viewing happens outside of Fairbanks, away from the city lights.

Winter tourists might want to try the top of Ester Dome which gives a view of the sky from horizon to horizon. A nice valley view can be seen in the Chatanika area.

Closer to town, try the Gilmore Trail looking west, or go to south Peger Road to escape the streetlights. If you are staying in a hotel, you can head down the street to wherever it seems a little darker. Winter visitors have been known to stand or lie in the middle of the Ranch Motel's roomy second parking lot to watch the lights.

The Best Time To See Aurora

The "Northern Lights", at their most dazzling from December to March when nights are longest and the sky darkest, can usually be seen even as far south as Juneau.

Undulating ribbons of light may shimmer in the sky for hours, like glowing, dancing curtains of green, yellow and orange or dark red, or magnificent veils with a full spectrum of colors, and with the altitude of its lower edge 60 to 70 miles above the earth.

Or the aurora may last 10-15 minutes, twisting and turning in patterns called "rayed bands", then whirling into a giant green corona in which rays appear to flare in all directions from a central point, and finally fade away.

The rarest aurora is the red aurora, like the one of February 11, 1958, which is still talked about today.

An Eskimo tale records that the northern lights are spirits playing ball in the sky with a walrus skull. Another legend, calls them the flaming torches carried by departed souls guiding travelers to the afterlife.

The scientific explanation is that the aurora is a physics phenomenon taking place 50 to 200 miles above the Earth. Solar winds flow across the Earth's upper atmosphere, hitting molecules of gas lighting them up much like a neon sign.

To study the phenomenon, researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks shoot rockets loaded with special instruments into the aurora from a launch pad at the Poker Flat Research Range, 30 miles northeast of town.

Color & Shape of Aurora

Among the most magnificent of natural phenomena, auroral displays appear in shades of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet and are usually brightest in their most northern latitudes. The aurora is seen in a variety of forms, e.g., as patches of light, in the form of streamers, arcs, banks, rays, or resembling hanging draperies. The aurora occurs between 35 mi and 600 mi (56 km–970 km) above the earth. It is caused by high-speed electrons and protons from the sun, which are trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts high above the earth and then channeled toward the polar regions by the earth's magnetic field. These electrically charged particles enter the atmosphere and collide with air molecules (chiefly oxygen and nitrogen), thus exciting them to luminosity; near the 600-mile level, the light may be given off by electrons and protons combining to form hydrogen atoms. The auroras coincide with periods of greatest sunspot activity and with magnetic storms (disturbances of the ionosphere which interfere with long-distance radio communication).

Aurora Borealis

The aurora borealis has fascinated, and often terrified, humans for thousands of years. The people of the north who saw the aurora frequently developed many legends and stories about it, while those who lived further south and rarely saw the aurora thought it was a supernatural omen of war or destruction.

As people began to seek more natural explanations for the aurora, they came up with many theories: reflected firelight from the edge of the world, sunlight reflected from the arctic ice, or maybe reflected by ice crystals high in the sky. It wasn't until the 20th century that people finally began to make headway in the study of the aurora, and there are still many unanswered questions about it.

Where Is The Best Place To See Aurora?

The maps below show the average location of the auroral oval in the northern and southern hemispheres.

In the northern hemisphere, prime viewing locations include Fairbanks, Alaska, and many locations in eastern Canada. In Europe, Iceland and northern Scandinavia see the most aurora. In the southern hemisphere, the aurora frequents uninhabited regions, making sightings of the southern lights, aurora australis, much rarer than the northern lights, aurora borealis.

The farther away from the average oval you live, the smaller your chance of seeing aurora. For example, people in the northern New England states may be able to see aurora several times a year, while people living in the southeastern US may only have the opportunity to see the aurora a few times in a century! The chart below shows the average percentage of nights per year that the aurora might be seen:

Besides location, weather and light pollution also affect your chances of seeing aurora. Obviously, you cannot see aurora if the sky is overcast. However, even a slight haze may prevent you from seeing the aurora if it is illuminated by light pollution from a nearby urban area.

Your best bet for seeing aurora is to get as close as you can to the position of the average auroral oval shown above, and as far away as you can from sources of artificial light.

Aurora (astronomy)

Auroras (north/south polar lights; or aurorae) are natural light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the polar regions. They typically occur in the ionosphere. They are also referred to as "polar auroras". In northern latitudes, the effect is known as the aurora borealis, and it was named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for north wind, Boreas by Pierre Gassendi in 1621. The aurora borealis is also called the northern polar lights, as it is only visible in the sky from the Northern Hemisphere, the chance of visibility increasing with proximity to the north magnetic pole, which is currently in the arctic islands of northern Canada. Aurorae seen near the magnetic pole may be high overhead, but from further away, they illuminate the northern horizon as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the sun was rising from an unusual direction. The aurora borealis most often occurs from September to October and from March to April. The Cree call this phenomenon the Dance of the Spirits.

Its southern counterpart, the aurora australis/southern polar lights, has similar properties, but is only visible from high southern latitudes in Antarctica, South America or Australasia. Australis is the Latin word for "of the South". The northern lights have had a number of names through history.

Benjamin Franklin first brought attention to the "mystery of the Northern Lights." He theorized the shifting lights to a concentration of electrical charges in the polar regions intensified by the snow and other moisture.

Astrourora