Free northern lights course: from the Sun to your first aurora

1How the northern lights course works

Each chapter answers one question in about five minutes of reading, with the figures taken from NOAA SWPC, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency and linked at the end. Chapter one is open to everyone. The later chapters ask for a free account: one email, no card, and the course remembers where the reader stopped. The same account will unlock the storm alerts when they arrive.

The course was written for the person who runs this site, who has never seen the aurora and wanted to understand the numbers before booking a trip. The data and method page has the technical version of everything the chapters explain in plain words.

2Northern lights course chapters

• 1
  What the aurora is and why it has coloursThe Sun, the solar wind, the magnetic field, and why green is common and red is rare. Open to everyone.
• 2
  Reading the Kp index, the bar colours and the solar windWhat each Kp level means for a place, what density, speed and Bz tell you, and how to read this site's dashboard in thirty seconds.
  Free account
• 3
  Climate change and the northern lightsWhat climate change does not change (the Sun), what it does change (your sky and your trip), and what research says about the upper atmosphere.
  Free account

Chapters on planning the first trip, photographing the aurora and reading the 27-day outlook follow as they pass the editorial review.

3Who the northern lights course is for

Anyone who has looked at a Kp forecast and not known whether 3 was good or bad. The chapters assume no physics and no travel experience. A reader who already knows what a coronal mass ejection is will find the pace slow and can jump to the method page, where the formulas and the sources live.