The Best Place on Earth to See the Northern Lights

Alaska sits directly beneath the auroral oval, a ring-shaped zone of maximum auroral activity that encircles the Arctic. Fairbanks, in the heart of the state, is widely considered the best place in the world to see the northern lights: it has over 200 clear nights a year and sits close enough to the magnetic pole that the aurora is visible on roughly two out of every three clear nights from late August through April. The lights appear when charged particles from the sun collide with gases in Earth's atmosphere, producing curtains of green, purple, and red light that can stretch across the entire sky. During intense solar storms, the aurora has been seen as far south as Texas and Florida.