Aurora Borealis

[Estella]

Those of you who recently cruised Alaska, were you fortunate to be able to witness the Aurora Borealis? If so and on ship, where was the best place? Will cruise starting the 21st for eleven days. Have always done spring cruising in Alaska, but wanted to compare and do late September.

[CruisinKiki]

There are some threads with good links to predictions of conditions over on the Alaska board. We are going on the 22nd and hoping to see them too! Good luck!

[pilotdane]

We just got off a Anchorage (Whittier) to Vancouver cruise. We had a great view of the aurora two nights while up in Fairbanks but we never saw them on the cruise due to fog & clouds every night.

 

Basically nobody knows if you will see them. Your chances will be much better if you are taking an excursion to Fairbanks or Barrow and you head out into the country away from city lights. The days are rapidly getting much shorter so you will have more dark hours to have a better chance of seeing them while you are on cruising.

 

 

Here is the link for the aurora forecast:

http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/

[zackiedawg]

On my mother's cruise in late July, the northern lights were visible twice as far south as Juneau. One display was nearly the entire northern sky from horizon to 90 degrees - lots of greens, yellows, and some blues...on the other, it was a faint horizon display peeking through the mountains with a few visble rods above a gently billowing green ribbon.

 

A great site to know when the Aurora is visible from anywhere in the world (including the Aurora Australis down south) is http://www.spaceweather.com. They have real-time NOAA magnetic aurora maps, sunspot tracking and live monitoring (sunspots flaring is what causes the earth's magnetic field to vibrate and extend, giving us those great aurora displays). Tonight is actually predicted to be a fairly large display, extending over most of Canada and Alaska and possibly visible from the northern continental US states.

 

Spaceweather also tracks meteors, showers, fireballs (a heck of a fireball over New Mexico yesterday!), and more. And there are some amazing Aurora galleries submitted by people all over the world.

 

You can register on the site for e-mail alerts when Auroras are acting up and likely to be visible.

 

I tracked the site for my mother during her Alaska cruise, so when she called me from a port, I was able to tell her the best nights to stay up looking for Auroras. With the help of this site, she was 2 for 2!

[Estella]

Thanks for the kind replys. I hope I am lucky, as it would thrill the hearts of our group to be able to witness such an event.