Where the polar bears roam, the northern lights glow.
February and March are the best months to see the ghostly aurora borealis, and you can now often view it (at night) on explore.org’s live Northern Lights cam. Explore.org is the same organization that livestreams the extraordinarily fat bears in Alaska.
The Northern Lights cam is located in Churchill, Canada, a place that often teems with polar bears (though polar bear numbers there have plummeted since the ’90s). The conservation group Polar Bears International is headquartered in this remote town, and they help coordinate the live cam.
“There are over 300 nights of lights a year in Churchill,” Krista Wright, the executive director of Polar Bears International, told Mashable last year.
“It’s definitely really cool,” Wright said. “You can get lights that are dancing and moving.”
But in February and March Churchill (located on the western shore of Hudson Bay) tends to have the clearest nights. Importantly, the best times to watch are generally from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. ET.
As Mashable previously reported:
Churchill is graced with vivid northern lights because the small Canadian town is located right beneath the Northern Hemisphere’s “Auroral Oval,” a ring in the atmosphere around the Arctic (there’s a ring over the Southern Hemisphere, too).
The spectral lights are created by billions of collisions between charged particles (electrons) from space with gases in our atmosphere. These collisions “excite” the molecules in the atmosphere, and when these molecules release this energy, they emit light.
When enough of these high atmospheric collisions occur, you get the northern lights.
A NOAA Northern Light’s forecast for Feb. 3, 2021.
Image: NOAA / SPACE WEATHER PREDICTION CENTER
The Northern Lights as seen from Churchill, Canada.
Image: madison stevens / polar bears international
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center’s forecast can give you a good idea of when the lights are visible. You can also use an app like My Aurora Forecast. Or you can just roll the dice and check out the sky.
See Also: The real winner of Fat Bear Week
It’s a good activity amid the worst pandemic in a century.