Sighting the Aurora Borealis in Alaska (2025)
I'm going to be honest with you: none of us really knew what we were signing up for during our Fall Break.
Well, I mean, except for one friend, it was her idea to assemble all of us to join her celestial journey to see the northern lights. Sure, she knows what happens in the atmosphere better than us, and she always has the craziest ideas, like asking me, a mom with a toddler, to join her on this trip.
We did it anyway. And I'm so glad we did.
This is always the first question people ask. And the honest answer is: because nowhere in the continental US gives you this.
Alaska sits at the top of the world, literally. Fairbanks, where we went, sits at roughly 64° north latitude. To put that in context, that's further north than most of Scandinavia. Most of Iceland. The city of Fairbanks is actually inside what scientists call the "auroral oval", a ring-shaped zone that permanently hovers around the magnetic poles where aurora activity is most concentrated. You don't go to Alaska to hope for the northern lights. You go because the odds are genuinely in your favor.
But aurora viewing also needs two things: darkness and a clear sky.
November is one of the best months because Fairbanks gets very little daylight, around 5 hours by mid-November, which means the sky is dark for a long, long time every night. And interior Alaska (away from the coast) tends to stay relatively dry and clear compared to, say, Anchorage, which gets hammered by Pacific weather systems.
So: high latitude, long nights, clear skies. That's why Fairbanks. That's why November.
Note: We also delved deeper into this website https://www.alaska.org/ , which tells us everything about Alaska.
Okay so here's the thing. When you land in Fairbanks in November and the air hits you like a wall, your instinct is to blame the snow or the wind. But it's actually more interesting than that.
Alaska's extreme cold! especially interior Alaska, away from the coast, comes down to a few compounding factors.
It's far from the ocean. Coastal places are moderated by water: the ocean absorbs heat in summer and releases it slowly in winter, keeping temperatures from swinging too wildly. But Fairbanks is landlocked, sitting in a broad river valley surrounded by mountains. There's no ocean nearby to take the edge off. This is called a continental climate, and interior Alaska has one of the most extreme versions of it on Earth. Summer temperatures can hit 90°F. Winter can drop to -40°F or colder. Even Fahrenheit goes minus.
The sun angle is brutal. Even when the sun does show up in November (for those 5 precious hours), it barely clears the horizon. It's not overhead, heating the ground directly, it's skimming sideways across the sky at a low angle, like someone shining a flashlight at a wall from across the room. The energy is spread out, diffused, barely warming anything.
Temperature inversions trap cold air. Here's the sneaky one. In Fairbanks, cold, dense air settles into the valley floor and just... stays there. Warm air sits on top of it like a lid. The result is that sometimes it's actually warmer up on the hillsides than down in the city, the opposite of what you'd expect. And the cold air at the bottom just sits and gets colder. Some winter nights in Fairbanks record some of the lowest temperatures of any inhabited city on Earth.
Day 1: Fairbanks, Alaska
We left home at 2:30 AM, drove straight to O'Hare, parked at the ORD parking station and caught our flight out at 6:00 AM. By 3:15 PM, we were touching down in Fairbanks, Alaska.
From above, we could see snow blanketing every inch of Alaska's terrestrial realm, an endless white canvas stretching as far as the eye could see. My 4-year-old was absolutely losing his mind with excitement, because all he saw was white, white, and more white. Pure toddler paradise.
Little did he know, that beautiful white wonderland was actively trying to freeze us alive. The temperature had dropped well below zero, and I mean well below, the kind of cold that makes you question every life decision that led you to this moment.
Three hours behind. That was the first thing we had to wrap our heads around. Alaska runs 3 hours behind Illinois, so our bodies were completely confused for the first day. I called this mini-jetlag.
We landed at 3:15 PM local time, which felt like early evening back home, but the sky outside already had that almost-dark quality that high-latitude November does.
We grabbed food somewhere along the way, nothing fancy, just that vegetarian meal that hits different after a long travel day, and then checked into our place. We'd booked the Bushplane Hangar Home on Airbnb, by the airport. It's a whole home (3 bedrooms, 1 bath), slept the seven of us fine (one other family joined us), and it had this incredible name that made us feel like real Alaska adventurers before we'd even stepped outside.
Before checking in to out AirBNB, we decided to have dinner at a Thai restaurant. We didn't plan it, we just knew we needed something warm, spicy, and soupy for this freezing temperature, the same instinct we always follow when the cold starts creeping in back in Southeast Asia.
We met a very nice Indonesian lady who worked there. We talked, she gave us some advice on what to do and what to eat in Fairbanks. There's a specific kind of warmth that happens when you meet someone from the same hometown in an unexpected place, a familiarity you didn't know you were missing until it shows up across a bowl of tom yum in Alaska. The conversation went on longer than we expected.
Nobody slept.
Okay, that's not entirely true. My toddler fell asleep as soon as we jumped back in the car after dinner.
We tried to sleep too. But when you've come all this way specifically to see the northern lights, lying in bed while there's a whole sky outside feels criminal. So at 9 PM, we were out. Just onto the balcony.
Beep! I got an Aurora KP notification from the app. I put on all my layers and the thickest winter jacket I brought. Triple socks before the winter boots. I felt so puff, like a very determined marshmallow.
I stepped out of our rented house and looked up as I walked. I saw something blurry, red and green, above my head, but couldn't confirm it with my poor eyes. So I took my phone out of my pocket, pointed it at the sky, and took a picture. Voilà ! There was a real aurora above me. My first aurora photo I took in Alaska!
So this is how aurora hunting actually works. It turns out, it's mostly just... looking up above your Airbnb. Which sounds anticlimactic, I know. Before booking the house, we read through the reviews. Some people said they saw the aurora right from the front yard. That turned out to be true.
And honestly? It's meditative. You're standing in the dark, eyes adjusting, neck craned upward, waiting. Talking in low voices. Laughing a little at how aggressively cold this state is.
We stayed out until 3 AM.
So the real question...did we see anything that night? Jackpot. We saw it on our very first night.
Before I tell you what we saw, you deserve to understand what you're actually looking at when the sky lights up. Because once you know, it hits even harder.
The northern lights are a collision.
The sun is constantly throwing stuff at us, not just light, but a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. Electrons and protons, traveling at a million miles an hour, constantly flowing outward from the sun in every direction. Most of this just bounces off Earth's magnetic field, which acts like a giant invisible shield around the planet.
But at the poles, the magnetic field lines converge and dip down toward the surface. This creates two "gaps" in the shield, one at the north pole, one at the south. Solar wind particles slip through these gaps and spiral down along the magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere, about 60 to 200 miles above Earth's surface.
When those charged particles collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, they transfer energy. The gas molecules get excited (in the physics sense, their electrons jump to a higher energy state). Then, almost immediately, they release that energy as light. That release is the aurora.
The color depends on which gas is being hit and at what altitude:
- Green is the most common. That's oxygen, at around 60–150 miles up.
- Red is oxygen too, but higher up — above 150 miles, where the atmosphere is thinner and the collisions are rarer and longer-lasting.
- Blue and purple are nitrogen, lower in the atmosphere.
- Pink, the pinkish fringe you sometimes see at the bottom of a green curtain, is nitrogen again, mixing with oxygen at lower altitudes.
The KP index is how scientists measure aurora strength on a scale of 0–9. KP 1 or 2 is a quiet night, barely visible. KP 5 or above is a geomagnetic storm, that's when you get the dramatic, full-sky displays with multiple colors. We checked the KP forecast every day through an app named Aurora. On our best nights, it was sitting at 4–5.
The shape of rippling curtain and pulsing bands, comes from the structure of Earth's magnetic field itself. The lights aren't just scattered randomly. They follow the field lines, which is why they appear in arcs and folds and waves. When the solar wind is especially strong and gusty, the whole display starts to move, shimmer, chase itself across the sky. That's when it stops looking like a natural phenomenon and starts looking like something that shouldn't be possible. (source)
How to Photograph the Aurora on Your Phone and Why Your Camera Sees It Better Than Your Eyes!
Here's something genuinely fascinating that we only understood after the first night: the aurora is visible to your eyes, but your phone camera sees it better.
This is not a camera trick or a filter. It's physics.
Human eyes are optimized for daytime. Our color receptors, the cone cells, need a certain threshold of light to activate properly. In very dim conditions, we switch to rod cells, which are more sensitive but can't distinguish color as well. This is why everything looks grayish at night. The aurora, even when it's strong, is diffuse light spread across a huge area of sky, not a concentrated bright source. Your brain can see the movement and the general greenish glow, but it tends to flatten the colors and lose the detail.
Your phone camera, on the other hand, has no such limitation. The sensor doesn't get tired, doesn't switch modes, and, crucially, can collect light over a long exposure. When you leave the shutter open for several seconds, it accumulates all that light and produces an image far more saturated and detailed than what your eyes perceived in real time. This is why aurora photos from phones often look almost more vivid than the real thing felt. The camera is being honest about the light; your eyes were just less efficient at collecting it.
So here's how to actually shoot it on your phone:
Step one: turn on Night Mode. On iPhones, Night Mode activates automatically in dark conditions you'll see a yellow moon icon appear in the top left of the camera app. On Android (Samsung, Pixel, etc.), look for "Night" or "Pro Night" mode in the camera options. This is what allows longer exposures.
Step two: stabilize your phone completely. A long exposure means any movement, including your hand shaking from cold, will blur the image. A small, cheap mini tripod that fits in your bag is worth its weight in gold here. If you don't have one, set your phone on a flat surface, a car roof, a fence post, a rock. Anything that keeps it completely still while the shutter is open.
Step three: use a timer or voice command to take the shot. The act of pressing the shutter button physically moves the phone slightly. Set a 2-3 second timer so the phone settles before it takes the photo.
Step four: adjust exposure time if your phone allows it. On iPhone, you can slide the exposure duration manually in Night Mode, try 5 to 10 seconds for a static aurora, and 2 to 3 seconds if it's moving fast (longer exposures will blur a fast-moving aurora into a smear). On Android Pro mode, look for the shutter speed setting (SS), the same logic applies.
Step five: don't use flash. Obviously. But worth saying because sometimes phones decide to be helpful.
Step six: keep your phone warm. Cold kills phone batteries faster than almost anything. Keep your phone in an inside pocket against your body when you're not actively shooting, and take it out only when the lights are doing something worth capturing. We lost one phone battery completely on night two from leaving it out too long. A portable battery pack in a warm pocket helps too. (source)
One honest note: video is harder than photos for aurora. Video doesn't get the benefit of long exposure, so it tends to look more like what your eyes see, a vague greenish glow rather than those saturated curtains. For video, some phones have a dedicated Night Video or Astrophoto Video mode that helps, but the results are still more modest. Our best aurora memories are stills, not video.
Day 2: Denali National Park
We decided to actually do some daytime things. And as a national park passport holder, I need to visit at least one park in each state I'm currently visiting, if there is one, of course.
We decided on Denali. Not that Alaska is short on national parks, it has eight, which is more than any other state, but most of them are either unreachable by road in winter or sitting so close to the Canadian border that getting there with a toddler felt less like a family trip and more like a survival mission.
Denali made the most sense. It's accessible, it's close to Fairbanks, and most importantly, we were traveling with a 4-year-old, which means the goal is to enjoy the trip, not to test the limits of human endurance on a remote wilderness road that may or may not be plowed.
Many of the park roads are closed from fall through winter anyway, so even the most adventurous options weren't really options. Denali it is.
Denali National Park is about two hours south of Fairbanks. We didn't do a hike; November is not hiking season, some trails are closed, and we were saving our energy for another aurora hunting. We visited the vistors center and unpacked our lunch there.
Here's the thing about Denali (the mountain, not the park): at 20,310 feet, it is the highest peak in North America. But that number doesn't really communicate the scale, because height-above-sea-level isn't the same as how imposing a mountain feels. Everest is taller in absolute terms, but Everest sits on the Tibetan Plateau, which is already 15,000 feet above sea level. Denali rises from a base of about 2,000 feet. That means the vertical rise from base to summit is roughly 18,000 feet, more than any other mountain on Earth when measured from its base.
Standing there, you can see it from a hundred miles away on a clear day. And it still doesn't look real. It looks like someone pasted a mountain from a different, larger scale of reality onto the horizon.
Denali has both black bears and grizzlies (brown bears).
Grizzly (brown bear), the more common threat in Denali: Don't run. Running triggers a chase response, and you will not win. Make yourself known before an encounter happens, talk, clap, make noise on the trail. If a grizzly charges and makes contact, play dead: face down, hands laced behind your neck, legs spread to make it harder to flip you over. Stay still until it leaves. Fighting back usually escalates things.
Black bear: Different calculus. If a black bear attacks, fight back, go for the nose and eyes. Black bear attacks are more likely to be predatory rather than defensive, so playing dead is the wrong move.
The road from Denali back to Fairbanks is about two hours, and we barely talk. Not because there's nothing to say, but because there's too much, and the mountain is still sitting in your chest. The sky does something strange on the way back: it was pink.
Not sunset-orange, not the dramatic red you see in postcards. Pink. Soft and wide, spread across the whole horizon like something embarrassed about being that pretty.
Sunlight looks white, but it's actually all colors mixed together. When it enters the atmosphere, it collides with gas molecules, and those molecules scatter the light, but not equally. Short wavelengths like blue and violet scatter the most, bouncing in every direction. That's why the sky is blue during the day: you're seeing scattered blue light coming from everywhere above you.
But when the sun is low like late afternoon in Alaska, where the sun stays close to the horizon for a long time, that light has to travel through a much longer stretch of atmosphere to reach your eyes. By the time it arrives, most of the blue has already scattered away. What's left are the longer wavelengths: oranges, reds, and pinks. The atmosphere filters itself into warmth.
The snow made it stranger and more beautiful. White snow has no color of its own; it just reflects whatever light hits it. So the entire landscape, every frost-covered tree in that photo, picked up the pink and held it.
Alaska's low sun angle means this kind of light lasts longer than it would anywhere further south. It doesn't rush. It just sits there, pink and enormous, while you stand on the side of a frozen road trying to take a photo that will never fully work.
This one came close.
No aurora for tonight. We recharged our energy for tomorrow's adventure.
Day 3: Chena Hot Spring, Ice Museum, and Another Aurora Sighting
The answer is that surface temperature and underground temperature are completely different things. Geothermal heat is generated by the decay of radioactive elements deep inside Earth's mantle, uranium, thorium, potassium, a process that has been running continuously for billions of years and has nothing to do with what's happening at the surface. The deeper you go, the hotter it gets, regardless of what the weather is doing up top.
In most places, groundwater sinks into the earth, is heated by geothermal energy, and either remains underground or rises slowly back up. But in volcanically or tectonically active areas, like much of Alaska, which sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, that geothermal heating is much more intense. Groundwater can be superheated and rapidly forced back to the surface. The result: hot springs.
Chena Hot Springs sits in a geothermal zone that pumps out water at around 156°F naturally. The resort moderates it down to a comfortable soaking temperature for the outdoor pools. So what you're actually doing when you sit in those pools is this: you're sitting in water heated by radioactive decay happening miles beneath you, while the temperature above your shoulders is well below freezing, and snow-covered trees are standing silent all around you.
It sounds impossible until you're in it.
And when you are in it, it looks exactly like something out of a fairy tale I used to read as a kid. Steam rising thick off the water in the freezing air, curling up into the dark sky where the aurora was doing its thing overhead. Snow on every branch. The whole scene lit soft and otherworldly, like the illustrator of a children's book decided to draw what magic looks like and somehow got it exactly right.
There are ponds on the property too, actual ponds, sitting quietly in the cold, home to ducks and the occasional visiting moose.
My toddler, meanwhile, was not allowed in the natural geothermal pool, children under 12 are kept out of it for safety reasons, which is completely fair. So he went to the jacuzzi and the indoor pool instead, which he treated as an equally serious adventure. He was not disappointed. If anything, having his own pool situation while the adults sat in the steaming outdoor pond in the freezing dark felt, to him, like the superior arrangement.
Honestly, he might have been right.
We talked to the woman at the souvenir shop who turned out to be the most useful person we'd talked to all day. We asked about the aurora. Specifically about this place and why everyone seems to mention as the place to go.
She said: aurora is almost always present in Alaska during this time of year. That's not the variable. The variable is two thing; KP and clouds.
KP, she explained, is a scale that measures geomagnetic activity. It runs from 0 to 9. The higher the number, the stronger the storm, and the further south the aurora pushes. A KP of 1 or 2 means it's there, but faint and close to the poles. A KP of 5 or above and it starts spilling across the whole sky, visible even from lower latitudes, brighter and more active. But none of that matters if clouds are sitting over your head. The aurora can be blazing at KP 7 and you'll see nothing but grey.
We checked the app right there in the shop. KP was high tonight. People go specifically to the hot springs for aurora viewing while enjoying the warm water, and it's far enough from city lights. But it's about an hour outside Fairbanks on a road that gets icy at night. We looked at each other. We'd already pushed a long day. The road back in the dark, on ice, felt like a gamble we didn't need to take. So we decided to find another spot. Somewhere closer. Somewhere we could get to without white-knuckling a frozen highway at midnight.
The website mentioned Creamer's Field. It's a migratory bird sanctuary, 2,200 acres of open refuge on the north edge of Fairbanks, the kind of place that in summer fills with sandhill cranes and waterfowl passing through on their way somewhere else. In winter, it becomes something different: just a wide, dark, open field with no trees in the way and no reason for streetlights.
Which makes it, quietly, one of the better aurora spots near the city.
We drove over. The field was empty. No other cars, no sound. Just frozen ground and a sky that goes all the way to the horizon in every direction. We were the ones who had stayed.
Then it moves. It's so dynamic.
That's the only word. The aurora dances. Bands of green fold and ripple like fabric in slow motion. The edges brighten and fade. A spike shoots upward. Pink appears at the bottom, where the greens are most intense. The whole thing expands and contracts like something breathing.
The thing that photographs can never capture is the movement. A photo shows you a frozen moment of beautiful color. But the aurora is in constant motion, slow enough that you can follow it, fast enough that you never want to look away. It's hypnotic in a genuinely primal way. Something in your brain recognizes that it is watching something real and rare and happening right now, and it will not let you be bored.
We stood there for hours across multiple nights. Nobody complained about the cold while the lights were up.
Saturday: Santa Claus House
Saturday was the day for the quirky stuff. We started at Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska. And yes, North Pole is a real city. It's about 14 miles south of Fairbanks. The entire city has legally committed to the Christmas theme: the street signs are candy cane striped, the streetlights are shaped like candy canes, and there are reindeer. Santa Claus House is part gift shop, part tourist attraction, part genuine local institution. You can write a letter to Santa from there and apparently get a response. We bought some things. We felt no shame about it.
One More Try. That night, we decided to go out again. The KP had been good and we weren't ready to let Alaska close without one more look at the sky.
But Alaska had other plans. The clouds had rolled in, thick and low, and there was rain, which is not what you want when you are standing in a field hoping for cosmic light shows. The sky was a uniform grey. There was nothing up there, or if there was, it was hidden behind weather that didn't care about our itinerary.
We drove back to the Airbnb.
We had an early flight. We packed quietly. We slept.
Practical Notes (Read This Before You Book)
Check road conditions every single day. Go to 511.alaska.gov. November roads in Alaska ice up fast and unexpectedly. We were driving out to aurora spots in the dark on rural roads. You do not want a surprise on those roads at 1 AM. Also, when your rent a car, the company will tell you which roads are prohibited and which are not. Decide at your own risk.
The time difference is 3 hours behind Illinois. This sounds obvious. You will still get confused. Make sure to check your time and calendar if you have a zoom beeting back home.
For aurora hunting, you don't need a tour. Drive 15–20 minutes outside Fairbanks, away from the light pollution over the city, find a pull-off with a clear northern view, turn off the car, and look up. Let your eyes comfortable with the dark and you'll find aurora. That's the whole thing. Check the KP index beforehand, there are free apps for this. Anything above 3 is worth being outside for.
What to Wear: A Completely Serious Guide to Not Being Miserable
This is the section I wish someone had written for me before we left. Because we got some of it right, and some of it wrong, and the wrong parts were very obvious at 1 AM in a field.
The core principle: you are not hiking. You're standing still. And standing still in -10°F to -20°F for two to four hours is a completely different physical challenge than moving through cold. When you move, your body generates heat. When you stand and stare at the sky, it doesn't. Dress accordingly.
The layering system of bottom to top:
Base layer (against your skin): This is the most important layer and the one people most often get wrong. Do not wear cotton. Cotton absorbs sweat and holds it against your skin, which will make you cold faster than almost anything else. Go with merino wool or synthetic moisture-wicking fabri, something that pulls moisture away. A merino wool long-sleeve top and merino wool long underwear for the legs. This is non-negotiable.
Mid layer (insulation): A fleece or down layer that traps warm air close to your body. For the upper body, a heavyweight fleece or a puffer jacket works well. For the legs, fleece-lined pants or a second layer of thermal leggings over your base layer. If you run cold, do both.
Outer layer (wind and waterproof shell): Wind is what turns cold into dangerous. An insulated, waterproof outer jacket on top, something with a good hood. For the legs, insulated snow pants or a waterproof shell over everything else.
Extremities! this is where people get caught out:
Hands: Regular gloves are not enough. You want liner gloves (thin, touchscreen-compatible) worn inside insulated mittens. Mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers share heat with each other. The liner gloves mean you can actually operate your phone camera for a few seconds without taking the mittens fully off. We learned this the hard way.
Feet: Insulated, waterproof winter boots rated to at least -20°F or -30°F. Wool socks underneath, again, not cotton. If your feet get cold, the whole night is over. There is no recovering from cold feet when you're standing in a field at midnight.
Head: A proper winter hat that covers your ears completely. Or a balaclava, which covers your whole face and neck except your eyes. Honestly, the balaclava is the move, it sounds extreme until you're wearing one and you realize your face isn't hurting anymore.
Face: If you're not using a balaclava, a neck gaiter pulled up over your nose and chin makes a significant difference. The skin on your face loses heat fast and you stop noticing it's numb until it becomes a problem.
One more thing: hand warmers. The little disposable chemical packs you shake and they heat up for 6–8 hours. Stuff them in your mittens, your boots, your pockets.
The total effect when you're fully geared up is that you look completely unrecognizable. Which is fine. Nobody's judging anyone's fashion at 1 AM in an Alaskan field.
Also, you can find some guidance on what proper extreme weather looks like online.
Alaska is the kind of place that makes you feel simultaneously very small and very lucky.
We came for the lights. We left with something harder to name. A reminder that the world is still full of things that have nothing to do with your inbox, your deadlines, or the noise you forgot you were carrying. That sometimes the most profound thing you can do is stand in the freezing dark with the people you love, neck craned upward, waiting for the sky to do something impossible, and then watching it actually do it.
But mostly, we left changed. Quietly, unhurriedly changed.
Go in November. Layer up more than you think you need to. Drive out into the dark, away from the lights of town, and just look up. Don't rush it. Let your eyes adjust. Let the cold wake you up in a way that coffee never quite manages.
You'll know what we mean when you get there.
Questions about the trip? Drop them in the comments. Happy to share everything we know.
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