The Atlas Obscura Guide to Seeing the Northern Lights
By Louise StoryAugust 14, 2026
Choose a place worth the trip even if the sky does nothing. Here is the failure mode nobody warns you about. You book a week in a country you chose because it appeared on a list of the best places to see the northern lights. You arrive. It is cloudy for six nights. You go home having seen nothing, and you conclude the country was wrong. The country was not wrong. The aurora is not a destination. It is a probability spread across a band of latitude, and no place on Earth can promise it to you. What a place can promise is everything else it contains — and that is the only defensible basis for choosing one. So this guide is organized the other way around. Not where the lights are most likely, but where you will be glad you went regardless. When to go: the solar cycle, the equinoxes, and the season The aurora runs on an eleven-year solar cycle. The current one peaked in October 2024, which sounds like bad news and isn't: the declining phase of a solar cycle has historically produced some of the largest geomagnetic storms on record. Elevated activity is expected to hold through 2027 before falling away toward the 2030s. More immediately useful: activity spikes around the equinoxes, when Earth's magnetic field sits at the angle that admits the solar wind most efficiently. Late September and March are the two best windows in any year. The season broadly runs September to March — you need darkness as much as solar weather, which is why summer is hopeless no matter how far north you go. Atlas Obscura's explainer on where and how to see auroras covers the mechanics, including why the show gets fainter and redder the further south you are: Earth's curvature blocks the brighter, lower-altitude displays, so southern viewers see only the high stuff. The full auroras collection goes deeper, including the aurora that citizen scientists identified and the one that looks like green sand dunes. Svalbard, if you want the strangest possible everything else Svalbard sits about 650 miles from the North Pole, and it is the clearest answer to the question this guide is asking, because the aurora is arguably the fourth or fifth most interesting thing there. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried in permafrost outside Longyearbyen, holding backup copies of the world's crop diversity against war, disaster, and mismanagement. It has already been used in earnest: the Syrian civil war prompted an emergency withdrawal of tens of thousands of seeds, since regrown elsewhere. It is also, inevitably, a magnet for conspiracy theories about billionaires and secret purposes — undercut somewhat by the daily commercial flights and the 2,700 people from fifty countries living down the road. North of Longyearbyen is Pyramiden, a Soviet coal-mining town bought from Sweden in 1927, home to more than a thousand people, abandoned in 1998. What remains is an Olympic-sized swimming pool decaying in the Arctic, a movie projector, and a room full of film reels. Because of the cold and dryness, it has been predicted to outlast every other modern human settlement on Earth. Atlas Obscura has photographs of it and the other abandoned structures of the high Arctic, including polar research shacks fitted with locks against bears. Pyramiden galaxygiggle | Atlas Obscura User And in Longyearbyen itself, burial has been effectively prohibited for decades. The ground is too cold for bodies to decompose. If the sky stays empty for a week in Svalbard, you have still had the trip. Iceland, if you want a foreground The problem with most aurora photographs is that they are pictures of a sky. The good ones have something underneath. Jökulsárlón is a glacial lagoon on the southern coast, full of drifting icebergs calved from Vatnajökull, and it does to aurora light what still water does to a moon. Photographers set up before sunset and wait. It is also a bittersweet place: melting has made the lagoon four times larger since the 1970s, and the beauty is a direct function of the loss. Directly across the road is Diamond Beach, where the icebergs that escape the lagoon wash back ashore onto black volcanic sand and sit there glittering. Diamond Beach tbobpage | Atlas Obscura User If Jökulsárlón is too busy — and it will be — Heinabergslón is twenty-three miles away, more than 330 feet deep, glacier-fed rather than ocean-fed, and almost empty of people. The colder water means its icebergs are less inclined to roll over, which is a thing icebergs do. Iceland also solves the waiting problem better than anywhere else, because you can do the waiting in geothermal water — the Blue Lagoon being the famous accident, a spa formed from the run-off of a geothermal power plant in the 1970s. There are 163 other unusual things in the Atlas for the cloudy nights. Arctic Norway, if you want the highest odds Tromsø is the most-recommended aurora destination on Earth and it earns it — it sits under the auroral oval, it has an airport, and it has an entire industry built around driving you to wherever the clouds aren't, which matters more than any other single factor. The trade-off is that you will not be alone. If that bothers you, the Lofoten Islands offer the same latitude band with jagged peaks instead of a city. Atlas Obscura's coverage of aurora photographers returns to Lofoten repeatedly — and to Dyrhólaey in Iceland, where the sea stacks have framed the rare crimson displays that come from oxygen collisions roughly 200 miles up. Lofoten Islands Luka Esenko Norway holds 141 other unusual things in the Atlas, which is a reasonable insurance policy against cloud. Finnish Lapland, if you want to watch from bed The Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort is a field of geodesic glass domes near the northern tip of Europe, built so nothing obstructs the view upward. Atlas Obscura's own description is that it looks like a sci-fi outpost built on the edge of the world to survive its collapse. It is the most photographed aurora accommodation in existence and — unusually for something that popular — a genuinely good idea, because the hardest part of aurora hunting is staying awake and outdoors at 2 a.m. in February. Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort MKeerati | Shutterstock The less obvious version is Arctic Guesthouse & Igloos in Ranua, where the glass igloos are mobile: they run on their own engines in summer and get towed out onto a frozen lake in winter, to a spot with no light pollution at all. Finland is also where the aurora is most actively studied by amateurs. In 2018 an enthusiast group spotted a formation resembling pale green sand dunes rippling across the sky, flagged it to a space physicist, and it turned out to be a previously unidentified aurora type forming far lower in the atmosphere than expected. It is now called the dunes. There are 96 other unusual things in Finland while you wait. Scotland, if you can't get to the Arctic This is the entry most lists omit. You do not strictly need the Arctic Circle — during strong storms the auroral oval pushes south, and southern Scotland catches it. Atlas Obscura's own aurora explainer notes that in a big enough storm the lights reach seventeen US states, appearing overhead in Minneapolis and low on the horizon as far down as Indianapolis and Cheyenne. Galloway Forest Park was the first Dark Sky Park in the UK and Europe and holds Gold Tier status, and the lights appear over the hills there on clear nights with reasonable regularity. One thing to know before you plan around it: the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory, which for a decade was the reason to go, burned down in June 2021 in a fire police treated as suspicious. A replacement is under way at the former Clatteringshaws visitor centre inside the park — two observing domes and a planetarium, planning approved — with opening estimates running from late 2026 into 2027. The park is worth the trip regardless. The building may or may not be there when you arrive. The former Scottish Dark Sky Observatory davidastro | Atlas Obscura User How not to waste the trip Go for at least five nights. Three is a coin flip. The largest single predictor of success is how many chances you give yourself. Pick somewhere with road access to multiple valleys. Cloud is local. The ability to drive ninety minutes to a different sky is worth more than a degree of latitude. Learn the Kp index before you go, and use NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center rather than an app that just says "tonight: good." Go near an equinox if you have any flexibility at all. And choose the place on what else is there. If the sky gives you nothing, you want to have spent the week somewhere already worth it. That is the whole argument of this guide, and it is the only aurora advice that never fails.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sign in to comment.
Related
Other articles with overlapping topics.
