Best place and time to see the aurora?

Wild aurora in northern Norway.

What is the best place and time to see the aurora?

I get asked this question a lot, and there’s no simple answer. But in what follows I give you some things to think about.

When to go

It needs to be dark to see the aurora, and when you go to high latitudes it gets very light in summer, above about 66 degrees there is 24-hour daylight in summer. In the northern hemisphere, the aurora season (when it will be dark enough to see the northern lights) is roughly Sept...