How to Look for the Northern Lights

Northern lights can be a mesmerizing sight in the sky. An enigmatic phenomenon, they inspire and delight both kids and adults lucky enough to see them. Despite popular belief, it is possible to see them in Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As such, there are first a couple of common myths that I’d like to debunk.

• Northern lights can only be seen in Scandinavia, Alaska, or Canada. False. Northern lights can be seen anywhere. It only depends on the severity of the solar storm that impacts Earth (explained further below). A solar storm in the fall of 2011 was even seen as far south as Alabama and Arizona.
• Northern lights can only be seen during winter. Also false. Northern lights can be seen at any time during the year, but because of the previous myth, in addition to the latitudes of those locations, there’s only enough darkness to see them there during winter. With nearly 24 hours of daylight during summer months, it’s virtually impossible to see them up there during summer, even though they could very well be out.

With that being said, you really don’t need any special equipment or techniques to know if they’re out. The Aurora Borealis are completely dependent on sunspot activity that takes place on the Sun. A site like SpaceWeatherLive.com gives plenty of information for what you need to see them.

What you’ll see on that site is lots of data that, at first glance, means absolutely nothing to you. In truth, to determine if the auroras are out for that night, you really only need to focus on one or two of them. The primary one, also featured as the largest one when the page loads, is the Kp Index. This is an arbitrary scale that measures the intensity of geomagnetic activity around the world. The scale goes from 1-9, where 1 is very little activity at all. Should the scale reach 9, southern-tier states such as Arizona, Texas, and Georgia may all very well be able to see auroras (light pollution notwithstanding).

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that measurement usually needs to get to a 6 before it’s clearly visible. I emphasized “usually” because there’s another factor that could very well affect the outcome, though not as significantly as the Kp Index. This one is known as the Bz, located a bit farther below the Kp Index.

The Bz measures the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field. Without getting too involved in the details, if the field drops below -10nT, and the Kp Index is 4-5 or higher, that could also cause the northern lights to be visible from Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park. Ideal conditions, of course, would be if the Kp were 6 or higher and the Bz was closer to -15 or lower. If you’re interested in reading more about how this all works from a scientific standpoint, you can learn more on this page.

In a nutshell, you can really just focus on those two measurements to determine if the northern lights will be out for any given night. Be sure to get away from light pollution to have the best opportunity to see them with the naked eye as well.