If you've never seen the northern lights and want to maximize your opportunity to do so,learn and pay attention to sunspot activity, as that's what drives the northern lights. Marquette and locations nearby have many areas along the lakeshore still publicly accessible, allowing for the opportunity to view the aurora right from the shoreline. I live in Marquette, Michigan which sits centered on the south shore of Lake Superior, and when looking north, there's nothing but lake for hundreds of miles. People often ask me how I've been able to see so many northern lights displays over the years and a lot of it has to do with what I mentioned above. Having a dark night sky with little light pollution is necessary when looking for the northern lights, as the light of the aurora is equal to the brightness of starlight. The Upper Peninsula is blessed with hundreds of miles of shoreline along the south shore of Lake Superior, which provides some of the best northern lights viewing in the lower 48 due to the very dark night skies. When looking north over Lake Superior, one can see right down to the horizon and take in a 180 degree unobstructed view of the night sky. Getting to a location without the obstruction of a treeline or hills is important at our latitude, as many times an auroral display will sit very low on the horizon. Northern Michigan sits in a great location latitude-wise, as the auroral oval dips further south on nights of stronger auroral activity. They put out a forecast track of CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections).Īnother NOAA site, has all the graphs including ACE real time solar wind for the bz component model.Aurora Borealis in Michigan | Photo Courtesy of Shawn Malone, LakeSuperiorPhoto Lots of graphs and details and everything explained!
Lots of info on this page, just click around! Good overall site to learn about spaceweather- you can subscribe to aurora alerts here. Headlands International Dark Sky Park Clear Sky Chart Learn more about the Northern Lights phenomenon at the following links: Also note that aurora are usually most active after midnight, and you’ll do best if you start out by looking north. And they are elusive, which means they can also occur without any warning! We have included here some great sites that you can research in order to help you in your hunt for aurora, and please note that we love it when you share pictures of what you’ve found in the night sky you can email them to us at or message them to us through the Headlands Facebook page. This solar wind puts a pressure on Earth’s magnetic field, which is not uniform, and when we come ’round to the times of Equinox every Spring and Fall, it seems the most vulnerable part of our magnetic field is exposed to the pressure of solar wind, and an increase in aurora is the result!Īurora predictions usually come only a day or two in advance of their occurrence, so please note that it is difficult to plan ahead if you are traveling from a great distance. The Northern Lights are a spectacular phenomenon that are hard to predict, and hard to forget! Their occurrence is tied to the activity of the Sun, and the solar wind caused by the eruption of spots on the Sun’s surface.
While we watched the wonder of waving color from the Headlands shoreline Labor Day weekend 2016, Jason Gillman was two miles east, catching the aurora as it draped itself beautifully over the shoulders of the Mackinac Bridge.
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