A most stupendous and audacious aurora

I just did some more research into what it would take to see an aurora.

So auroras are just about the largest nonastronomical object you will ever see. They can be ~200 miles high, ~500 miles wide, and thousands of miles long. Because they are formed by high-velocity solar wind particles hitting various layers of the atmosphere, they can change in a matter of minutes despite their enormous size.

For comparison, even hurricanes are only about 8 miles high... so an aurora is to a hurricane as a door is to a welcome mat.  This picture shows it off rather well:



They seem to hit the sweet spot of being huge while still viscerally comprehensible in their size (unlike, say, the sun)

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I spent a lot of time looking into the quality of the aurora at various times.  

We're at the low point for sunspot activity, which interestingly means more predictable auroras.  If there's more sunspot activity, the aurora becomes stronger but moves further south, which means that you just wasted your money flying up to Fairbanks while the residents of Juneau are getting the show of a lifetime.   The most intense aurora activity ever recorded put brilliant shows of light across the Midwest US.  This happened in the 1800s, which is a good thing because if it happened today we'd have a few billion dollars of fried satellites.  Back then its dancing red skies probably just scared the crap out of some ultra-religious pioneers. 

Here's a "space weather" site with aurora prediction:  http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/

I also looked at moon activity since the moon's light can dampen the aurora.  Sunrise/sunset/moonrise/moonset/twilight reports for very northerly locations are *weird*.  The sun is always moving at a glancing angle  to the horizon, so twilight is extremely long.  Fairbanks gets a whopping 6 hours of daylight in November.  In addition, the moon is also always close to the horizon.  Because of the moon's rotation around the earth, the earth's rotation and moon's rotation can interact in such a way that the moon will stay above the horizon for two full days (or below for two full days).
( Cut for extreme weather-geekery )

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At this point I'm thinking Fairbanks over Iceland or Scandinavia.  The areas of Scandinavia that are good aurora-watching territory are very far from most of the cultural stuff.   Iceland could work well, but there's a huge amount of natural beauty there that would be hard to see during the 6-hour days.  The Great Icelandic Road trip is best undertaken in the summer.  Iceland is also easy to throw in as a stopover to a future Europe trip.  Icelandair has tickets that encourage t

The Fairbanks planning also looks fairly easy... there are lots of B&Bs you can stay at for $100 a night.

No aurora

Thanks to some advice from my friend Brad and some detailed research into solar wind predictions, current sunspot activity (none), and other esoterica of space weather, I've determined that the next month (and generally speaking, the next 2-3 years) is really bad for aurora watching.  It's kind of cool that you can partially predict aurora levels 28 days in advance because the sun (and any aurora-causing features on its surface) rotates every 28 days.  Currently the sun is featureless.  We're at the minimum of an 11 year cycle in solar activity, and apparently this minimum is the worst minimum they've had in the last 4 cycles.

So now I'm thinking about alternate locations for a short trip.  I'm looking at a west coast road trip, a trip to Costa Rica or somewhere else in Central America, and a couple of other options.