Northern Lights Guide

The Northern Lights are one of nature's great displays, a free, multicolored light show that is most commonly seen in the Arctic regions. Every performance is different, a beautiful, shifting dance of nocturnal rainbows that many viewers find a humbling and spiritually uplifting experience.

The mesmeric lights are formed from fast-moving, electrically charged particles that emanate from the sun. These are driven towards the Poles by the Earth’s magnetic field and their varying colors are a result of the different gases in the upper atmosphere. In the northern hemisphere, they are known as the aurora borealis and hang above the planet in an oval-shaped halo.

The lights also have their southern counterpart above Antarctica, the aurora australis, but the principal audience for this is penguins :D.

It must be a dark, cloudless night for the northern lights to be visible. Northern Norway during the polar night is, therefore, your best bet for experiencing the northern lights. Experience shows that the northern lights shine most often and strongest a few hours before and after midnight. The northern lights are strongest when an active area on the sun’s surface faces Earth. Spectacular displays of the northern lights thus occur at roughly 27-day intervals, the time it takes the sun to rotate once. October, February and March are the best months for seeing the aurora borealis.