Night light season

With temperatures dipping below freezing -- and even lower as the weeks go by -- the peak season for viewing the aurora borealis is here.

The nighttime ribbons of color that dance across the sky have already been spotted by a number of people, and the northern lights will only be out more and more as temperatures dip and the nights grow longer.

Experts agree that the farther north you travel, the better the show gets. Fairbanks, for example, is an aurora borealis watcher's paradise. Many cabins in the Fairbanks area have special viewing capabilities -- windows in the roof, so people can watch the spectacular greens, reds and purples from inside a cozy cabin. They are called auroriums, and many tour operators offer packages in the Fairbanks area.

According to the Fairbanks Visitors and Convention Center Web site, Fairbanks sits under what is called the "auroral oval," a ring-shaped region around the North Pole. "The location offers a great balance of occurrence, frequency and activity. Intensity varies from night to night, with the best viewing from late evening through the wee hours of the morning, late August to April," the site boasts. If visitors spend three consecutive days in Fairbanks during those months, the FVCC says, there is an 80-percent chance they'll see the northern lights.

In the Valley, there are plenty of viewing opportunities, with some arguing that the most majestic site you'll see in Alaska is the northern lights dancing above Pioneer Peak with a full moon in the sky.

Hatcher Pass offers fabulous viewing opportunities because, like all good viewing areas, it is out of the way of city lights from the lower Valley. You want to get to a place that is as dark as possible, experts say, to optimize viewing. If you are photographing the northern lights, the darker the location the better.

While nobody can predict when the northern lights will appear in the sky, you can look for "factors" such as colder temperatures and clear night skies. You can also check the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute's Web page for a daily aurora forecast to help predict when the best viewing times will be.

Now that you know when to look, what exactly are you looking at? Everyone knows the colors are bright and the show is amazing, but what causes the northern lights? That answer isn't as simple as it may seem.

The sun is continually tossing positive ions our way due to the process that it takes to keep the sun burning. When the particles get close to our planet, they get "sucked" to the North Pole and South Pole because of the magnetism of the Earth.

In our atmosphere, they are moving fast and knock electrons out of atoms in the upper atmosphere, and when those loose atoms are caught by another atom, light is emitted, and you get that phone call in the middle of the night that the aurora borealis is shining. Near the South Pole, the visible lights are called the corona borealis.

When going out to watch or photograph the aurora borealis, remember to dress warm.