Instant Genius - How to actually see the Northern lights

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

These days many of us have a bucket list, a set of experiences we’d like to have at least once in our lives. Seeing the Northern Lights with our own eyes is likely top of many of these. But what is the best way to ensure that when we do take a trip to see this mysterious, ghostly phenomenon we have a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime experience? In this episode we speak to Tom Kerss an aurora chaser, astronomer and author of the book Northern Lights: The definitive guide to auroras about the best way to see the breathtaking phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis. He tells us when and where to go to have the best chances of seeing the Northern Lights, what we should take and wear to have the best experience, and why often it’s a better idea to put down your camera and simply enjoy the spectacle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. These days, many of us have a bucket list, a set of experiences we'd like to have at least once in our lives. Seeing the northern lights with our own eyes is likely top of many of these. But what is the best way to ensure that when we do take a trip to see this mysterious ghostly phenomenon, we have a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime experience.

In this episode, we speak to Tom Kurz, an Aurora Chaser, astronomer, an author of the book, Northern Lights, the definitive guide to auroras. He tells us when and where to go to have the best chances of seeing the Northern Lights, what we should take and where to have the best experience, and why it's often a better idea

to put down your camera and simply enjoy the spectacle. So you're an Aurora Chaser, So what exactly do you mean by that? And what's the day to day like? What is the day to day like? That one I'm going to have to think about. So I'll buy myself some time by answering the first question. What is an Aurora Chaser? Well, anyone that takes an interest in the Northern Lights and gets the bug and decides to go back, I think could credibly be called an Aurora Chaser. There's nothing special about me. But I do have a particular fascination with the experience of the Northern Lights. And while we're here, you know, talking. in a very kind of scientific context. I'll try not to go too far off the rails. But the Aurora experiencing it can be so personal. It can be almost spiritual.

It can inspire artistic interpretation. And so people have very varied reactions to it. I have my own personal history of experiencing the Aurora. But very early on, I began working, taking people to see the Northern Lights. Initially just families with young children and giving them that experience and traveling to places like Iceland. and I realized that it was a very transformative experience, and it was one of the few things you can go and see on Earth, where whatever you pay to do it, you will forget.

You won't feel ripped off. If you pay a lot of money to go and see it, all of that will go out of your head when you experience the kind of silent beauty of this unbelievable skybound phenomenon. So it's something I really believe in, and so now I've tailored my career to work professionally with the Northern Lights in the autumn and winter seasons to try and not only, take people to see it, but working to try and advocate for the experience and help people understand

it. Not just people who come with me to Norway, but everyone through media and public engagement, because we know a lot more about it than we've ever known. And the engagement with the Northern Lights keeps increasing because we live in this world of cycles. It takes 11 years or so to go from one solar maximum to the next. The last one was in 2014. But now we live in an age where the alert systems are so much better. Social media is absolutely climbing aboard the Aurora train, and people's smartphones in their pockets can take fantastic photos of auroras, which were just not possible in 2014. So with every solar maximum, with every solar cycle, the interest surges in a whole new way. So my role as an Aurora Chaser, it's sort of treading new ground in how to

make the most of that and to give as many people as possible the best possible experience with engaging with it. In terms of what the day-to-day is like, well, it just, there are no two similar days. I suppose there are some similar nights, but in terms of the things that we do, it's quite remarkable. Sometimes I'll be travelling to get new photography or footage of the Northern Lights. Quite often, I'm engaging with the press and the media to help them understand why the Aurora sometimes becomes visible in the UK and how best to see it and how it differs from the experience of going up to the Arctic. I may also be working in a sort of consultancy role to help people develop a more accurate impression of the Northern Lights.

And in that case, I've actually worked, for example, with artists and even with studios making TV shows and so on. And then for myself, I'm always trying to advance my own understanding of the Northern Lights historically, because I'm not a historian, and mythologically, perhaps, and also in the realm of forecasting, which is a cutting-edge field, trying to improve that and give people more opportunities to have better experience with the lights in general. And then, of course, I do just spend a lot of time in the Arctic, observing the lights and sharing that experience, which is ultimately my favourite part of being an Aurora Chaser.

So you mentioned there the mythology. So I think this is really interesting, because as you say, for anyone who's experienced seeing them, it's a very moving experience. And obviously, going back thousands of years, they were still visible. So what sort of, like you say,

myths or cultural ideas about them have been proposed, you know, or worshipped or something? something like that. You know, when you think about meteor showers and eclipses, these are events that have inspired rich mythology. But none of these events have quite the level of sort of creaturely personality as the Northern Lights. There's nothing else in the sky that seems to have a mind of its own, quite like the Northern Lights. And it's simply different every time. So it's hardly surprising that there's a very rich mythology. But how you viewed the Northern Lights thousands

of years ago would depend upon where you were. Because if you come to southern latitudes, for example, into the Mediterranean, maybe into parts of China, then sightings of the northern lights, which would be very rare, would appear over the northern horizon. And if any color were to be visible, it would likely be a rather warm color, red perhaps, or orange or pink. The reason being that from those latitudes, you would probably only see the top of the auroral curtain. and from such latitudes, the auroral curtain being over on the horizon would also be sort of reddened by the atmosphere. So as a result, the mythology from that region tends to connect auroras with the same things as other natural red phenomena do. They tend to be connected with bad omens, with ill portent, maybe fires burning in the north where perhaps a war is waging or an army is marching on you.

And so, for example, in ancient Rome, there was a great deal of superstition about the lights. they were even said to have showed up before Julius Caesar was assassinated by his own Senate. And in many other stories, they were sort of retroactively stapled on to bad things that happened within the Roman Empire. But if you come to the Nordic region where ancient stories are much more attuned with the natural every-night experience of the Aurora, basically just a part of the nightlife, you get a kind of rich mythology. So, for example, the Sami people who are the indigenous people of northern Norway, would tell all manner of stories about the lights, and they have multiple words for the lights. One of their words is Guafsahas, which means the light that you can hear.

And they would describe the lights as quarrelling in the sky by making noises, and that those quarrels could be used to actually arbitrate disagreements between tribes. So the tribe leaders would sit together while the lights danced, and whichever a Royal Display 1 would decide the outcome of that argument. Quite a nice solution, you know, rather than resorting to violence. But you also had stories in the same. army tradition of the lights potentially being quite dangerous. And if you were to wander off alone and attract the attention of the lights, they could come down from the sky and sort of abduct

you up into the realm of the northern lights. But, you know, when you think about it, that's not a bad thing to tell a child to stop them kind of wandering off into the snow at night on their own. From Estonia in the Baltics, you have these wonderful stories about, for example, humpback whales in the Baltic Sea and their scales reflecting light into the sky. The Swedish have an old word, which is Silblixed, which means herring flash. So to them, it was abundant herring in the sea that the scales flashlight into the sky. So here you're connecting the lights with Providence. You know, it's a good sign.

It shows that there's plentiful food out there in the sea. Very important, of course, to coastal communities. But perhaps one of the big surprises about Aurora mythology comes from the Vikings. This is something I've researched extensively. I'm myself slightly Viking. I'm half Danish. And so you might expect that when I was a kid that my Danish ancestors taught, me about what the Vikings believed. But it turns out the Vikings probably didn't experience

auroras that often during the Viking age because of the location of the auroral oval being more favourable over North America. And as a result, they really didn't write anything down. So there's a lot of stories about the Vikings believing that auroras were the bifrost bridge in the sky, or perhaps the armour that the Valkyries wore up, the final battle of Ragnarok reflecting light into the sky. But this all appears to be just kind of made up, embellished, long after the Viking age-ended by scholars that were trying to unpick their mythology and perhaps kind of sex it up a bit to make it seem more wild. So there's very rich mythology, often connected to the natural world, sometimes connected to the spirits of loved ones lost. But the further south you go, the more

superstitious it actually becomes. That's because those auroral displays were so uncommon. Maybe one of the earliest cases of an auroral display being canonized actually comes from the biblical book of Ezekiel when Ezekiel was exiled and spent a year in exile. He said to have seen three visions, according to the story. And the first of those was a so-called wind storm out of the north, which was a color of molten metal in the northern part of the sky. But those who study the timeline of the biblical chronology have suggested that his exile was in 567 BCE. And in that very same year, King Nebuchadnezzar II's royal astronomers, who wouldn't have been that far away from Sumer or from now Iraq over in Babylon, they actually did record

on a rural display, and they were some of the best record keepers of the age. So perhaps that's the first example of a rural mythology, entering, entering literature and becoming really a canon story. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs.

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So if I am planning a trip to see the Aurora, what are my best options? You know, where should I go? Now, you may have seen in the news last year that we had Aurora's visit us. I actually saw them in May of last year in Florida, if you can believe it. And then again, subsequently in October in London.

And I'll be honest, I did not expect to see them in either of those locations in my lifetime, let alone both in the same year. So that was quite extraordinary. Now, that has, of course, captured public interest. And if you wait long enough, for example, if you live in the UK and you can get out to a dark sky site, the odds are you will have the opportunity at some point in the future to see the northern lights. But it will be very weather dependent. It will depend upon it occurring when the sky is dark enough. and it will be dependent upon you getting to the right spot. So my advice, if you're really keen to see the Northern Lights,

is to make your own Arctic adventure. That is to say, to travel north, just like the polar explorers of the past. And I think that makes it all the more exciting because you're actually hunting it and then you get to go on the excitement of the chase and be hopefully rewarded with all of that work. So there are many good destinations where you can go and see the Northern Lights.

if you're in the US, you can go to Alaska, for example, where access to the northern lights in the autumn and winter months is very good. Europeans love to travel to Iceland, to Norway, to the north of Sweden or Finland, and those are all fantastic places to go. I spend a lot of time myself on the Arctic coast of Norway, which I think is a fabulous place to see it. And as a result of that, it's very comfortable for Aurora Chasers in the northern hemisphere to find a good place to travel to.

But I would make some considerations beforehand about it. your trip. So the first thing to think about is the weather, because the weather can be very changeable. And I always recommend trying to find a spot where the weather forecast is about 50% clear. You can use services like Weather Spark to look at the historical records for how much clear sky you get. But even then, you want to give yourself several nights. I mean, the more nights you can spend in the Arctic, the better. So if you go out there for like one or two nights and it's a 50% clear forecast, doesn't mean you're going to get one clear night and one cloudy one. And actually your odds probably aren't that great. So weather is generally the big decider.

If you can give yourself quite a lot of time, then start thinking about the time of year. When you're going to the Arctic, there are places, by definition, where the sun does not rise for a significant amount of time during the winter months or the autumn winter months. There is the polar night, which is very dark and can be very cold. If you enjoy the cold, I personally am a kind of no pain, no gain type person, then I think it's all a good part of the experience. But if you want more clement weather, some more warmer conditions, maybe look at, you know, September, October and then maybe kind of February March as good months to go, because it's going to be a little bit warmer. You won't get the

super cold depths of December and January in particular. And then maybe consider if you can pick dates and times, traveling around a new moon period, because when the moon is in the sky, it acts as a source of kind of natural light pollution. Now, this isn't terrible. If you see bright auroras, you can have a full moon in your face and bright aurora. And bright aurora. is erupting and it's all visible at the same time. But if your auroras aren't going to get that bright, then having a new moon will give you an advantage because it will make the sky much darker. But if you do want to do some photography of the landscape, having a bit of moonlight doesn't hurt because it lights up the landscape and it can make your photos look ethereal and very

beautiful as well. And then finally, I think my my recommendation is wherever you decide to go and whenever you decide to go, try to be mobile if you can. So, you know, if you're going to do some overground chasing, rent a car. If you're going to come with me, we'll be on a ship that's always on the move, just because you want to be always capable of getting to clear a sky and making some judgments on the night as you're out and about, finding some good sights, some promising looking sites and being able to hop among them wherever the weather looks best. That's the best that I can recommend for now, but you can always find out more information in my book, and you can always get in contact with me if you want to know more about, you know,

how to maximize your chances. But as I say, it's about the time that you go. It's about getting as many nights as you can, and it's about being mobile. Say I've picked my spot and my time of year. What sort of equipment should I take with me? I mean, strictly speaking, the only thing you need is your eyes. In fact, there's no optical equipment that can give you a better view.

If you use a pair of binoculars or a telescope, you're zeroing in too much on the sky, and the aurora is a very big phenomenon by nature. But of course, I recognize that one of the key things that everybody wants to do is take photographs. And I get the bug as well. I will make a comment on that. I'll say this. We tend to remember the things we don't take pictures of.

In the modern world, we are so tied to our smartphone cameras and we are constantly photographing and filming our lives. But the overall displays I actually remember the most are the ones that I didn't take pictures of because my battery had died or I just didn't have my camera with me. and so I thoroughly recommend making sure you take time to look because you can't share the pictures that you take in your head, but you can feel them, and they are really very special memories. Now, if you do want to get into Aurora photography, it's a wonderful hobby. The best news is that since the last solar maximum, over a decade ago, we've moved from having smartphones that were basically useless in low light

to smartphones that can take actual astronomical images using the same principles that astrophotographers use by integrating images in a sequence and then bringing out all of the detail and the light and the colour. So the chances are if you have a flagship smartphone made within the last three to five years and you pointed at the sky and you pointed at the northern lights, it's going to capture a beautiful and colourful photo revealing all of the colour that your eye kind of struggles to perceive, and we can talk about why in a moment. If you want to take a dedicated camera and you know a little bit about photography. Then with astro photography, the rules are always to use wider and

faster lenses because you want to be able to let a lot of lighting quickly. Make sure you're shooting on a tripod and preferably with a remote shutter so you can take longer exposures. Always capture those pictures in a raw format so you can, you have a lot of latitude for processing them later. And then just practice patience because the aurora is constantly changing and your pictures will look absolutely unique and what you capture will be completely your own. If you're going to go out on the chase and do it in the kind of old-fashioned way, then it seems sort of pedestrian to mention, but it is important. Make sure you have really good clothing. When you go to Norway, for example, they always tell you that there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. And it's true.

I've learned from all my experience in the Arctic, and I wasn't born and raised in the Arctic, so I'm not naturally, you know, designed for the cold. But I've learned from my experience that a good thermal layer, and then above that, a good woolen layer, and then finally a windproof layer is generally all you need. Three layers is all you need, but you just need the thermal, the woollen, which creates a good thermal barrier, and then a windproof layer, because it's the wind that will get into you. And then finally, you know, just being able to navigate in the dark, if you're going to go out on land and walk around in the snow, maybe think about like a red light, a red torch, because if you use red light, it will allow your eyes to remain adjusted to the dark, and it's going to make your

Aurora chasing experience a lot better, and it's just good etiquette not to shine bright lights into other people's eyes when you're out and about. So you mentioned there the different colors in photographs. I've often heard people say this. They'll take a photograph with the aurora. So well, that looks entirely different from what I saw with my naked eye. So why is that? I know.

It's such a common part of the experience. And it's one of those aspects of all astronomical experiences where part of my role and my job is trying to manage people's expectations. because if you're coming to see the Northern Lights, you've probably already seen 50,000 breathtaking photos of the Northern Lights. And likewise, if you're coming to look through a telescope, you've probably already seen images from Hubble and James Webb that look absolutely astonishing.

And the reality is that the Aurora does not look like that to our eyes, but that's not because it's not the way it looks. It's because of the way we perceive things. So when you point your camera at the Northern Lights and take an image, your camera is going to provide you an unbiased impression. It will capture all of the light that it can, and it will filter the light through different colors, and then it will digitize that

and produce a full color picture of the sky with all of the color that it has received. So the color in the northern light shown on the photographs is in a sense real color, but we tend to think of what is real as what we perceive, and the reality is that our eyes don't work the same way that cameras do. So cameras work by having these pixels, and the pixels do the same thing, whether it's day or night.

And in our eyes, we have something like pixels, but we have two different flavors of them. We call them photo receptors, and they're the cells on our retina. So during the day, when you're looking around and you can see all of the variety of color, your eye is using three or four. Most people have three, but some people have four. Cone cells, which are sensitive to red, green, and blue to build up a full color picture at the world.

But when the light level gets low, the cone cells struggle to provide information to the brain. They are not very light sensitive. And so to help us out, our eyes use what we call rod cells, which are very sensitive photoreceptors, but our rod cells are generally a lower resolution, so the low light appears blurrier to us. We don't see things as sharply in the dark. And also the rod cells are only providing a brightness information to the brain.

So they are effectively a monochromatic or black and white vision. And so if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're not adapted to see any colour at all, you look around your room. If you can discern any colour, it's only from your memory that you're actually remembering what colour things are. But if you were to go into a strange room at night and be fully adapted to the dark, you wouldn't be able to discern colour at all. So when we're looking at the lights, we're in a sort of

halfway situation. Our rod cells are giving us information about how bright the northern lights are, and our cone cells are just grasping for any colour information they can get. But because it's very little, the impression that we form in our mind is that the lights appear very pallid, like the saturation slider has been pushed all the way down. If we're going to see any colour at all, the first thing we'll see is green because that's where the peak color sensitivity in our eye falls. Luckily, the aurora is a bright green, so we do tend to see green in the aurora quite easily. But it's not the kind of vibrant green, like the leafy green that you see in photographs. It's more like the kind of green that you get from those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that you

stuck on your bedroom ceiling as a child. You know, it's a kind of like off-white kind of green. And then the other colours are even harder to discern. So red doesn't appear as a kind of blood-red to your eye. It appears like a very dark scarlet in the sky, and it takes a bit of experience to spot. The pink that can appear at the bottom of the curtain, courtesy of molecular nitrogen, that often looks quite white to our eye, but at times it can be a very vibrant electric pink. It just becomes so bright that all of our cone cells suddenly go, oh, it's pink, and that's a great experience, but it's fleeting.

And the rarest color of all to see is blue. I've only seen it a couple of times in my life visually with my eyes, and blue aurora is very special, but again, our eyes are not well adjusted to see those in the dark. So if we're going to see colour, we just need the aurora to become very, very bright. But I think managing your expectation and understanding that the colour isn't as vibrant is important if you want to enjoy the northern lights, because there's more to it than the colour. There's the movement, there's the softness. And there's something special about auroras that you don't really get from photographs,

which is that unlike clouds and other things in the sky that reflect light, the aurora is evidently self-luminous. if it's no brighter than a cloud, it impresses itself onto your retina. You can feel that it's glowing. It's almost warm. You know, there's almost like a phantom sensation that this is a glowing phenomenon, not a reflective phenomenon. And so there are lots of subtle, beautiful things about the experience that are not the same as the colour. But when you then point your camera at the lights and take a picture, wow, all of that colour appears. And suddenly, it's a whole different experience. It's just important to recognise that it's not because it's not real. It's just that our

eyes fall short of showing us the world the way that cameras can. So, sort of one final question, a slightly unfair question, is, you know, what have been your most memorable Aurora experiences? Now, when I began working with the Northern Lights, I was working in Iceland and I needed to do a bit of orientation in the southwest of Iceland. So just for a laugh, I jumped on a local Aurora bus tour. I don't normally recommend taking an Aurora bus tour unless people know what they're doing because it tends to end up dropping hundreds of people off in one location and lots of people

get their flash photos out and the etiquette is rather poor. So to get away from the group, I was walking out in the sort of Icelandic, I don't know what you would call it, it's not really a tundra, but the kind of snowy plains going up to the glacier. And I was enraptured by this rural display. It was very beautiful. As soon as my eyes adapted from the bright lights of the bus, I realized that, there it is, you know, and I recognised immediately the auroral oval. And it was really beautiful. I hadn't seen it for a couple of years. So I was walking forwards,

just totally absorbed in the sky. And I managed to put my foot right through the ice of a frozen stream and plunge it about eight inches into incredibly cold water running under the ice. And I'll never forget, because I went from being kind of in the ether to back on the surface of the earth in a tenth of a second from the experience. Anyway, once I drive my foot, off I was back in the sky again, but that was very memorable. That's sort of a memory that stuck with me for years, and I always tell people that story. I do have a very good recent memory, which was that when I was in Norway on one of our ships, I met a guy called Jim, and I'll never forget Jim. Jim was a professional photographer, but he was retired. So when I first met him,

he insisted that he wouldn't be taking any photos because he was retired. He wasn't here to do photography. And I've never met anyone who spent so much time just absorbing the Northern lights. I'm so used to seeing people frantically trying to get their cameras out and capture the experience. And Jim just insisted on watching it. And one day we were sailing south out of a port in Arctic Norway called Svalvar. It's known as the capital of the Lefoten Islands. And as we were sailing south, we looked up and saw the northern lights over this beautiful mountainous region. And above it, the Geminid meteor shower in mid-December was just shooting these bright shooting stars through the northern lights. It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever

experienced and Jim and I stood there in silence for a very long time watching it. And eventually we would talk about it a great deal and we still stayed in touch. And that experience has made me think that when I'm retired, I want to be like Jim. He's my model for my retirement. So perhaps not quite one experience, but the Aurora has connected me with a person that really inspired me. And I thank the Aurora and being an Aurora Chaser for that. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Tom Curse. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Northern Lights, the definitive guide to Aurora's.

If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our presenters and guests in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC ScienceFocus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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