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Seeing the northern lights is one of those bucket list ticks that many dream about, but few accomplish.

For a start, it’s not cheap to fly to the likes of Canada and then head up north, hoping to catch a glimpse of this beautiful natural phenomenon.

The town of Churchill has become somewhat famous for the proliferation of polar bears that wander about, although their numbers have decreased in recent times.

It’s also one of the best places in the world to watch the northern lights, or Aurora borealis, with around 300 nights a year featuring the lights.

In fact, February and March are the best times of the year, according to Krista Wright, the executive director of Polar Bears International, one of the research organisations in the area.

We are eight hours ahead of Churchill, Canada, so this should be prime viewing time in the dead of the night. At various points whilst writing this, the lights have appeared, and then disappeared, so we make no guarantees.

Here’s the stream aimed at the sky:

While you wait to see if you strike it lucky, here’s Mashable to help you pass the time:

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.

As mentioned earlier, the lights are at least partly visible on around 300 nights per year, although the degree of visibility varies.

If you want to figure out when you’re in for a real show, there is the Space Weather Prediction Center’s forecast, and there’s also an app worth taking a look at.

Nothing beats the real thing, in person, but perhaps this will have to suffice.

[source:mashable]