How to Plan a Northern Lights Trip
It may seem almost impossible for you to access the feeling of miracle in today’s environment where all information is available whenever you want it, but the answer, I believe, is often in the natural world. Whether it’s the sensation of a strange cool breeze that occurs during a total eclipse, watching a thousandth murmur of a starling in the sky, or tasting a fresh mango plucked from a tree in front of you – our sensory perceptions of earthly pleasures – even if we know exactly how and why they happen – may surprise us again.
So it is with the polar lights. You can understand their mechanism – I’ll talk about it below – but this is one of those things that you need to experience bodily, live, in order to understand. This explains why people take trips and vacations just for this. Here’s what you need to know if you are thinking of a trip to see the Northern Lights.
And in general, what is the northern lights?
Otherworldly vibrations of colorful light are actually the result of some very specific earthly and cosmic phenomena. When our magnetosphere (which normally protects us from solar radiation) is disrupted by solar winds, “… charged particles collide and ionize with trace amounts of nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, causing them to emit light when they recombine,” explains Khee-Gan Lee . Astrophysicist and NASA Hubble Scientist.
Usually seen in shades of bright and shimmering green and turquoise, red and blue lights are less common. “They appear in these distinctive colors because, like a laser, these recombination lines occur at certain narrow wavelengths of light, rather than a broad spectrum like sunlight,” Lee said. According to Lee, these are not static lights like rainbows – they move in response to the solar wind, vibrating due to the natural “springy” properties of the force lines of the Earth’s magnetic field.
The aurora can only be seen in the auroral zone, which is only about 3-6 degrees wide at a distance of about 10-20 degrees from the poles (north or south) – which is why some people call them auroras – and can only be seen in the dark. background of the night sky.
How can you see him?
If you are not fortunate enough to live in one of the areas quite far north (or south) where the aurora occurs naturally, you will have to take a trip to see one of the magnificent sights. Iceland is a popular destination and is easily accessible from the US East Coast, including flights that stop there on their way to the UK or Europe. (Icelandair and WOW offer free transfers.)
Lapland, the indigenous Sami cultural region that includes the northern regions of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia, is another attraction. Alaska in the US and Yukon in Canada are good options if you want to stay in North America, and lights can also be found in the islands and highlands of Scotland (although it tends to be more cloudy there than some of the other places mentioned, which can limit visibility). In the southern hemisphere, the lights are known as Aurora Australis and are visible from some of the southernmost latitudes of Australia and New Zealand, as well as Chile and Argentina in South America, and Antarctica.
Wherever you decide to go, you need to give yourself enough time to see them – the auroras don’t appear every night or on any predictable schedule like the moon or tides. However, knowledgeable people can make reasonable predictions based on short-term solar flare activity. To see the Northern Lights in the Northern Hemisphere, the best time of the year is November to early March. Flip it over for the southern hemisphere; their Aurora Australis season begins in March and continues in winter.
Lola Akinmade Åkerström , an award-winning author and photographer based in Stockholm for National Geographic Creative, has seen the auroras 5 times and says you should schedule a window of at least 3-5 days to make sure if you go out to see the lights , you will have a good chance to observe them on at least one of the nights you travel. She also advises working with local guides who are experts in finding aurora: “They know where to go and especially when to go, and they always track activity on the auroral websites and NASA channels,” Ackerstrom said.
What will you see
Expect a light show – with colors and activity driven by cosmic forces that most of us don’t actually track. Light can travel in stripes, lines, or spread across the sky, and it can move in different ways, from ripples to appearance and disappearance. Capturing a good photo of the northern lights can be tricky, so if you plan to do so read a couple of tutorials and get ready. It goes without saying that donning warm clothing will be a simple yet essential part of enjoying the light without getting hung up on frozen toes. And yes, you might even hear something – although there have been discussions in recent years, recent science has proven that auroras do make quiet and eerie sounds .
Åkerström says that her most memorable memory of the northern lights was when she stayed at the Nutti Sami Siida reindeer house in northern Sweden. “After a simple dinner of reindeer prepared by Elder Anders Karrstedt, he walked out of the wooden cabin we were in on a dark winter night and scanned the horizon for signs of the northern lights,” Ockerstrom said. After waiting a bit with light flashes here and there, Karrstedt predicted that the lights should appear in a couple of hours. “Like a clockwork, the lights started to appear a few minutes after 9:00 pm and then flashed in the sky in vibrant greens, purples and pinks,” said Åkerström, paying tribute to Karrstedt’s local knowledge and experience with his ability to determine when the best show would be. … be.
You might get lucky too
In fact, it’s not uncommon to see auroras from airplanes on long-distance routes that pass over or near the poles. These routes, which people in the aviation business call the Polar Route or Santa’s Label, have been inaugurated since 1998 and could provide a unique opportunity to see the Northern Lights as you are miles above the earth’s surface. Be sure to pick a window seat (always a great idea; you can see incredible sights from 30,000 feet above the ground) and watch your seat guidance system to determine when you will be near the poles. Seattle-based writer Kat Bohannon was returning to the United States from China in 2003 when she was somewhere over the Bering Sea when the rustle of conversation was heard in her cockpit.
“Right outside, large streaks of multicolored light wriggled across the sky,” Bohannon told Lifehacker. “It was the strangest thing – it seemed like level with our plane just a few miles away. I gathered my thin blue airy blanket and pulled it over my head like a hood as I looked out the window. I couldn’t stop staring at these streaks of light. You could actually see their structure, up there, their height , where they stopped and started in the atmosphere. And you could see them moving. Like something alive.