What's up nerds, it is so good to see you again. Thank you for coming back. I am here in the unbelievably beautiful Lufoten islands of Northern Norway. One of my favorite places in the world, I think it's probably pretty obvious why if you look behind me and I am here chasing the Aurora Boriawis or the Northern Lights as some of you may call them. I wanted to talk through a little bit of Why I come here where you can go to find them and what you should do to position yourself correctly to view the Northern Lights for the first time and How to capture it all on camera now? This is going to be a two-part video series the first one's going to cover Where to go how to find them how to read the weather app predictions because the Aurora Boriawis deal with space weather and we can forecast it in much the same way that we forecast surface weather but the forecasts are a little bit tricky to read so I'm going to walk you through how to read those How to position yourself where to go what time to go out and then part two will be talking about How to use your camera to capture those beautiful lights in the wild So starting off with the where of course they're called the Northern Lights so to start off It's probably smart to head north you also might not know that there is such a thing as the Southern Lights really all That's required is that you get a little bit closer to either of the Earth's poles either North Pole or South Pole That's because the Northern Lights are actually driven by the magnetic field of our planet so the magnetic North Pole and magnetic South Pole Actually pull the charged particles from the Sun towards them the Aurora appears in what's called the Aurora oval So not the exact North Pole but it makes kind of a ring shape around the North and South Pole of our planet This means it pretty much anywhere from about 64 degrees north to about 75 degrees north is going to be the perfect location So if you're in North America that's anywhere maybe north of like Edmonton Canada up all the way through anywhere in Alaska In Europe of course Norway Sweden Finland's Northern Russia all of that Greenland will be perfect just head north and that's all you need Now the next question I get a lot is what time of year and Put simply the only real recipe you need to see the Northern Lights is a clear sky and nighttime now Unfortunately in the Northern Hemisphere really far north that means that it's gonna have to be winter There is literally no nighttime on these islands in the summer They go through almost a full month where the Sun literally doesn't set so Anytime honestly between the fall equinox and the spring equinox would be the perfect opportunity to see them All you need to make sure that happens is that you have nighttime now We've already talked about how you need a dark sky to see the Aurora So of course near the poles that's going to mean winter But you might not have considered you also need to wait for a nearly moonless night You can still see the Northern Lights on a full moon evening But it does brighten the sky it'll make the Aurora look dimmer or at least a little bit less brilliant So I always prefer to be between the quarter moons near the new moon It's the darkest possible sky and it gives you the best possible chances of seeing the Northern Lights Now the best news is that the Aurora Borealis is considered space weather so much like surface weather down here on the ground We have the technology to predict it in advance Which allows you to position yourself outside ahead of a beautiful Aurora display So that you have the best possible odds of seeing it floating just over 930,000 miles above the surface of the earth is the deep space climate observatory satellite or discover for short This satellite measures solar wind and our geomagnetic field in real time and Transmits that data back to earth publicly available so that we can see it now I'm not going to sift through all of that data on my own So I use an app on my phone called Aurora alerts which helps me sort through that and understand where it's coming from I'm going to walk you through some of those settings right now as you can understand because there's a lot on this Home screen and it's kind of difficult to decipher So once you open the app you'll see right at the top There's a percentage prediction for both overhead and Aurora on the horizon now the further north you are the more likely it is that those two numbers are the same This is very applicable if you're in a state like Montana or Washington or even southern Canada The like-lute of seeing it overhead is usually very low but seeing it on the northern horizon can be fairly high Now way up here. I'm directly under this Aurora oval So for the most part my percentage of horizon and overhead is almost always the same now the unit of measure that everyone is most familiar with is the KP index Fascinatingly I've found this to actually be the least useful metric for predicting the Aurora Especially if you're far north like this the KP index measures how much lean the Aurora has in our atmosphere Which does indicate how far south you'll be able to see it But if you are very far north like you should be it basically is almost irrelevant I have had some of the best Aurora of my entire life at a KP of one and Similarly, I've been outside in the Arctic with a KP of five and seeing almost nothing so it does Maybe have something to do with how likely you are to see the Aurora, but I put very little weight in that now The four rings below the percentage on the app and above the KP index That's really the meat of your prediction. Let's walk through those left to right and I'll explain how each one relates to your Likely good of seeing the Aurora at night the speed ring Measures the velocity of the solar winds coming out of the Sun now of course faster wind speeds have a higher energy when they hit our Magnetosphere Which then creates a stronger likelihood of seeing the Aurora ambient solar wind speeds around 300 kilometers per second So anything above 400 or 500 kilometers per second is an excellent number now the BZ is generally regarded as the most important Parameter for seeing the Aurora the BZ measures the solar winds magnetic orientation in the north-south direction Although the Aurora can happen with a positive BZ the more negative it is the more likely you are to see it a Negative BZ helps our magnetosphere grab the solar wind and pull it into our atmosphere Which again is what creates the Aurora in the first place the more negative the BZ the better if you see negative one or two That's fantastic if you see negative seven or eight Absolutely go outside no questions ask the density is exactly what it sounds like it measures how dense the solar wind is a higher Density means more solar wind particles, which means more likely collisions with atomic particles in our atmosphere and again Better stronger Aurora the BT measures the strength of the inner planetary magnetic field or the IMF again Just like the others the higher the number the better so that's about it for predicting the Aurora as you can probably see behind me I have a pretty clear sky the Sun is going down and I've got my camera ready to go So I'm going to go inside warm up and get ready for a night of shooting the Aurora Thanks for watching part one stay tuned for part two. I'll see you soon All right, everybody. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed part one I hope you learned a lot about how to find the Northern Lights just a quick reminder I actually teach in person workshops up here in the Lufiton Islands of Norway Every single February click the link in the description below and I will help you not only find Northern Lights but photograph them as well