How to View the Northern Lights From New England and the Midwest

Several years ago, on a cold, mid-March evening at about 10 p.m., I took my dogs out for a walk beyond the lights of our home in Carbondale, Colo. The sky was ablaze with stars, and as I looked up for the Big Dipper and the North Star, I noticed that the far horizon pulsated in a green glow. I couldn’t believe that I was seeing the northern lights.

Like other aurora borealis sightings I’d had in New Hampshire and Alaska, the glow transformed into green strobes, as if multiple search beams were working the sky. Charged particles from the sun had entered the Earth’s magnetic field thousands of miles above, and as they rained into the planet’s upper atmosphere, the particles collided with nitrogen and oxygen atoms, lighting the sky with rose pink and pale green bands of shimmering light.

One needn’t incur frostbite, climb to high altitude or journey to Sweden or the Alaska’s Far North to see the northern lights. With careful planning, timing and luck, bearing witness to the aurora borealis in the Lower 48 is one of the greatest yet most rarely seen spectacles for anyone willing to sacrifice a bit of sleep.

“Whether you are lucky enough to witness them depends on a number of things, including how active the current solar cycle is,” said Mirka Zapletal, the director of education at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, N.H. And in 2022, there is expected to be more activity — more charged particles brought to our upper atmosphere by sun flares and the solar wind — than in recent years.

Patience is mandatory, along with clear, darkened skies and an aurora forecast in order to catch the elusive spectacle. The fact that there are no guarantees to see the lights makes a sighting all the more spectacular. Here’s a selection of outdoor destinations in the continental United States that offer a chance to see the northern lights if your timing is right. These places are also rich in recreational opportunities in case the weather fails to cooperate or you sleep through the alarm.

What to know, wherever you go

The aurora borealis, which often blazes for half-hour cycles followed by two hours of dormancy, can be seen only after dark, with the hours surrounding midnight offering the most optimal viewing conditions. The lights are not visible in summer, on full moon nights or amid city lights.

The equinox months of March and September are the most ideal times to catch the display. (But on clear nights, with an unobstructed and darkened vantage point of the northern horizon, they can occasionally be seen from fall through early spring as far south as Pennsylvania — in 1958, viewers witnessed an extremely rare aurora display from Mexico City.)

In addition to obtaining a weather forecast for cloudless skies, aurora borealis forecasts are essential. The website of the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, Alaska, provides weekly updated North American aurora forecasts for the next three hours, three days or 27 days. This year, their index that measures disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field forecasts that the nights of March 11 and 19 (the day after a full moon) will offer the best chances of seeing the lights in the Lower 48.