Why Do the Northern and Southern Lights Differ?

I would recommend going to Yellowknife in Canada instead. If you stay there 3 nights, you have a 95% chance of seeing it. Plus it’s closer to the magnetic north, so the lights always pass over regardless of intensity.

Don’t get too excited of WOW flights - prices in Iceland are pretty steep.

That's nonsense. I have worked in remote northern locales for years as a geophysicist, and - the northern lights can be utterly amazing. You do not always need a long exposure camera to see them; they can be vivid, dancing and mesmerizing in reds, purples, whites and greens. Sounds like the sun wasn't active when you saw them. I have seen such incredible displays it was unnerving - with the entire sky shimmering in pockets of bright green whisps of light, and purple bands of light shining down upon me as I stood on a frozen lake on a cold, crisp night.

As someone who grew up in Montana and North Dakota and has been an amateur astronomer from my early teens, I think you're being overly dismissive. Sure, sometimes and they're more of a faint white glow (which is pretty impressive just by itself), but in over two decades of semi-dedicated skywatching (before moving further south), I saw, with nothing but naked eyes, bright green curtains on multiple occasions, dazzling blue-white pillars all the way up to the zenith once, and red curtains twice. And that's living between 46 and 48 degrees of longitude where they're not that common.

If you're setting out on a trip to specifically view the aurora borealis, you'd want to make sure you're viewing from an area with very low light pollution, make sure you stay dark adapted, and schedule your trip around solar max. Under those circumstances, and given multiple clear nights, I would expect the odds would be excellent for seeing some quite breathtaking auroras.

> The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with the incredible green light displays you see in pictures.

No, the northern lights did not dazzle you that one time you saw them, and from your description it doesn't seem to have been a very spectacular occurrence that night.

And from that you extrapolate that everyone else is somehow lying or exaggerating when they're describing what they saw?

You do understand that they vary in strength and appearance quite a bit, right?

I've only been lucky enough to see the northern lights once, and what I saw could not in any way, shape of form be mistaken for clouds. I was too far south for them to be very bright, but I'll never forget the sight of the entire sky appearing to be made out of wobbling green fire. Absolutely breathtaking.

A few years ago I spent a week in Norway (Tromso) to catch the northern lights. On our last night, we were walking with a Norwegian that was cross-country skiing in the middle of the night when the sky lit up with amazing, vibrant greens, purples, and even golds. The Norwegian even commented that he's never seem it so amazing before.

For most of the week we were impressed by the beautiful, slowly flowing rivers of green in the sky, and the glowing green snow around us. But for ten minutes that night, we saw something so extraordinary that I absolutely cannot describe the sensation of seeing shapes, colours, and motions that the eyes and mind simply did not evolve to comprehend.

I have definitely seen skies that look just like the pictures while growing up in northern Alberta. But it's not consistent. Just showing up and expecting the sky to dazzle you on demand is not how it works, and it's a shame if it's advertised that way.

I was driving home from Vancouver to Kamloops one night through the coastal range to BC's interior on Highway 5 somewhere between the Coquihalla summit and Merritt - I don't recall exactly where on the road I was, possibly close to Kingsvale (Approx. 50°N). It was pitch dark when it began, no city lights and so many stars, so bright, they were endless. That stretch of highway is spectacular on a clear night. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I used to drive that stretch once every couple of weeks for about a year after I moved to Canada at the end of 1999, so it would've been that winter season. I used to take the mid-afternoon Friday flight from Heathrow so I would've landed in Vancouver at around 5:30pm and by the time I got my car out of long term parking and got to that point it would have been around 9pm or so.

The Aurora was so close and so vivid and bright it seemed as if it was intruding into the car, close enough to touch if you could touch it, but it's like trying to touch a rainbow, you just can't. It screws with your brain. I pulled over on the side of the highway and got out. They were vivid hues of green, pink and yellow and they were bright enough in the dark that even without the lights of my car, I could see clear detail of the landscape, brighter than if lit by a full moon, but not quite like daylight. The entire sky lit up as far as you could see with pillars of light that ebbed and waned like a symphony of light and colour. There was nothing faint or subtle about it. I could see the hairs on the back of my hand it was so bright. Even my description fails to capture its beauty.

The oddest thing about having experienced that was it was so blurry, it screwed with my eyes and my brain. Not being able to focus on it was like driving in thick fog. Despite it being a magical and mesmerizing experience, I felt some discomfort. I couldn't look at it for longer than a few seconds at a time before I had to look back to the road and hillside so my eyes could focus on something.

I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, for 25 years.

On numerous occasions the aurora were bright enough that you could easily see to walk safely at night without a flashlight. Yes, it was a dim green glow on the ground but looking up directly at them, they were as bright as a full moon.

Sounds like astronomy photos, always shown in super-saturated color. As compared to looking at the same thing with the naked eye, which looks close to black and white.

Sorry you were unlucky during your trip. I've seen the sort you've described, but I can confirm what the other commenters are saying.

It does look different from most pictures, but that's because they usually don't resolve the fine structure (eg all the wikipedia photos on the aurora page are a little blurred, though the real thing sometimes looks blurred as well) and you don't get a feeling for the three-dimensionality.

There are almost no good videos as well. The best I've seen was as bright as.. a half- to full moon with respect to how you see the ground/ease of moving around? (Hard to judge from memory.)

My parents-in-law experienced a similar thing, and were definitively told that that's as good as it gets.

... They were on a tour where you get your money back if you don't see the lights.