Alaska is known as a good place for seeing the polar aurora, also known as "Northern Lights. But the southern hemisphere has the same phenomenon, with the glow coming from the south , so scientists prefer to call it simply the "Polar Aurora.
Alaskans claim that only around August 16 does the sky get dark enough to see stars, which is when aurora stands out. After that date, your best bet is to go to Fairbanks--and since the brightest auroras occur around midnight or later, due to Alaska's time zone , you might have to stay up a long time.
Perhaps it is better then to ask the night clerk at your hotel to ring you up if a good display becomes visible. Appearance and relation to magnetism What does it look like? Most often, you see greenish white ribbons stretching across the sky, roughly from east to west, usually with waves in them. In Fairbanks they could be overhead, in northern Norway or Sweden too, sometimes even in Winnipeg.
Further south those ribbons tend to be near the northern horizon. And if you look closely at them, you will note that they contain many parallel rays, running across their width see picture below. Two things about those rays.
One, the bright ones fade while dim ones brighten instead--a bit like flames in a fireplace, and just as mesmerizing. Some auroras are deep red, and these may be just a shapeless glow--or they may have rays, too. And second, the direction of those rays is related to the magnetism of the Earth. Anyone who has ever used a compass knows that the Earth is a giant magnet. The needle of the compass usually points towards one of two points, the magnetic poles of the Earth, located near the geographic poles.
