Catch the Northern Lights Without Leaving the Lower 48
As the sun reaches its solar maximum in 2024, the contiguous US—and, more specifically, the Upper Midwest—could be a haven for viewing the northern lights.
The northern lights are different every time you see them. Sometimes they appear as nothing more than a subtle glow along the northern horizon, a drifting emerald fog beneath the stars. Other times, they’re unmissable—kinetic swirls of green, yellow, and pink that shape-shift overhead. In 2024, they’re likely to be at their most vibrant in years.
“As we get closer to solar max, we’re going to get more of these geomagnetic storms that push the aurora farther south, typically with brilliant colors and amazing formations,” says Melissa Kaelin, co-founder of the Aurora Summit and founder of the Michigan Aurora Chasers. During this period, you won’t have to travel all the way to Iceland for the show; it’ll be right here in the Lower 48. “This year alone, I’ve been able to catch the aurora a few times within 30 miles of [Ann Arbor, Michigan].”
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are created by solar activity erupting from the sun and passing through Earth’s magnetic poles. Broadly speaking, when there is little solar activity, the aurora can be seen only far north on the planet, if it’s visible at all. When there is a lot of solar activity—if, for instance, the sun just had a coronal mass ejection that launched large amounts of charged plasma from its corona toward Earth—the aurora tends to be more vibrant at northern latitudes and visible as far south as northern Missouri, northern California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
The solar cycle lasts roughly 11 years and sees the activity on the surface of the sun fluctuate. The latest forecast from scientists predicts that the solar maximum, its most active period, will arrive in early 2024 and last into the fall. For a small but passionate group of “aurora chasers” like Melissa Kaelin, this is their Olympics.
Kaelin has been chasing the northern lights for 11 years, a quest both literal and existential. “I know the exact date when I started chasing. It was actually the one-year anniversary of the day I lost several family members in a car crash,” says Kaelin. In the newspaper that day, she saw a photo titled “On Angel’s Wings,” showing a brilliant auroral display captured nearby. “I said, ‘This happened right in my backyard while I was sleeping? No way.’ All of a sudden, it gave me this purpose and this drive and this excitement to capture something so ethereal.”
It took her five attempts and more than a year before she successfully found the aurora. The work she put in proved fortuitous. Kaelin has since written a book about the northern lights, launched both the aforementioned Aurora Summit, a festival that celebrates the art and science of the northern lights, and the Michigan Aurora Chasers, a group of 96,000 who help one another find and photograph the northern lights in Michigan. “You can’t really replace that feeling of leading someone to their first aurora,” Kaelin says. “It inspires me every day.”
Minnesota-based Elizabeth Miller is the administrator of the Upper Midwest Aurora Chasers group on Facebook, which boasts 25,000 aurora enthusiasts. She first saw the northern lights as a preschooler with her father, a World War II pilot and night-sky enthusiast.
“It’s as inspiring as it ever was because it’s my dad,” says Miller of her more than five decades of aurora chasing. “My dad died when I was 31. I lost him very young. He is probably the single most important influence in my life. Going out and watching the night sky, and the Milky Way, and the aurora is still my way of connecting with him. When I’m out there under the aurora, I feel his presence.”
While Kaelin and Miller both have personal connections that have made them lifelong aurora enthusiasts, there’s still something special up there for anyone who has the patience to go out and find it. “Just being able to go stand in my backyard and watch [the northern lights] still feels awe-inspiring,” says Miller. “We’re pretty insignificant on this planet. Watching them makes you feel like you’re part of something way bigger and more powerful than you realize. So yeah, it doesn’t get old.”
The Upper Midwest might not be the first place that comes to mind when travelers think of the aurora. Norway, Finland, and Iceland are northern locales more frequently associated with vivid displays. But the Upper Midwest has many advantages, particularly in 2024.
“The Great Lakes region really is a great place to see the aurora because we don’t struggle with things like midnight sun like you get in some northern countries and states like Alaska or Sweden,” says Kaelin of areas in the far north where the sun doesn’t set around the summer solstice, making it impossible to see the northern lights for stretches of the summer months. “We have darkness year-round, so you can see aurora even in the summer.”
Furthermore, the Upper Midwest is well situated in relation to the auroral oval. The area where the aurora appears is a ring around the magnetic poles. That ring isn’t a circle, though; it’s an oval that extends farther south in some areas than in others. “The deep portion of that oval dips right through the Great Lakes region and gives us some of the best proximity to the northern lights when it’s strong,” says Kaelin.
Because of that positioning, lodges and resorts in the north frequently offer night-sky and northern lights excursions, such as packages at the Gunflint Lodge in northern Minnesota or night-sky photography workshops offered by the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge on the northern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Though, as with any time you’re hunting those ethereal lights, the aurora isn’t on a schedule. Be prepared to enjoy the night sky as it is, because there’s always a chance that’s all you’ll see.
“I remember when I was a beginner, and I was still attempting to see the northern lights, [I was] getting aced over and over,” says Kaelin. “A lot of people helped me figure out how to see it with more reliability.”
There are a lot of factors that contribute to viewability of the northern lights, especially as far south as the Upper Midwest. Groups like Kaelin’s watch the geomagnetic forecast—from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center or sites like SpaceWeather.com—and help decode the when, and where, for newcomers. There are also useful apps, like Aurora Pro and Aurora Alerts, that aid with more immediate plans; the forecasts are useful but project geomagnetic activity over a broad swath of time. These apps help determine whether the aurora is likely to be out at the moment you intend to go looking for it.
Whether you go it alone or join a group, there is one key ingredient in aurora chasing: patience. That slowness is part of the draw. “You can’t just go wait 15 minutes and then give up,” says Miller. “You have to go and be willing to sit there. But when you see it for the first time, it will be like nothing else you’ve ever seen in your life… it’s surreal, absolutely surreal.”