The Best Places to See the Northern Lights

No one can promise you the northern lights. You need three things at once: a place far enough north to sit under the auroral oval, a sky dark enough, and a sky clear enough. Activity can't be forecast more than a few days ahead, and cloud can't be argued with. What you can choose is where the odds are best, and stay long enough — three or four nights at least — to give them a chance. It's never dark enough in high summer; the season runs roughly from late August or September to March.

Tromsø has the most going on: a city on an island in the auroral zone, with polar night from late November and an aurora festival in January. Its weakness is the coast, which brings cloud, so most tours here drive inland after clearer skies. Abisko, in Swedish Lapland, has the opposite strengths: 85 people, almost no light, and a train from Stockholm. Saariselkä, a fell resort in Finnish Lapland next to Urho Kekkonen National Park, puts dark skies a few minutes' walk away.

Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, is the easiest to reach, and Finnish Lapland sees auroras on as many as 200 nights a year. Harads, south of the circle in Sweden, is where you can watch from a treehouse room.

Across the Atlantic, Yellowknife, on Great Slave Lake, turned from gold to the aurora as its mines wound down, and Fairbanks in interior Alaska sees the lights on more than 200 days a year on average.