Aurora tonight in Fairbanks

Can you see the aurora borealis from Fairbanks?

At Fairbanks's latitude the aurora is ordinary winter weather, not a rare spectacle: the oval sits close enough that even a quiet night can put something in the sky.

Fairbanks sits in the Alaskan interior, not on the coast, and that matters more than its latitude: interior air in winter is cold, dry and stable, which means clearer skies than the wetter coastal towns further south. It also has one of the longest-running aurora research communities in the world, which is why the local understanding of what Kp 2 actually produces here is unusually well established.

Country

United States

Magnetic latitude

65°N

Geographic latitude

64.84°

Aurora threshold

Kp 2

Light pollution

Bortle 3

Deep-dark nights / yr

212

Sun at solar midnight

48.6° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Fairbanks aurora season

Fairbanks has 212 genuinely dark nights a year, from about **6 Sep** through to about **5 Apr**. That figure comes out of the city's own latitude rather than a regional rule of thumb, which is why it can sit weeks away from a neighbouring city. The counter-season is just as clearly defined: from about **6 Apr** to **5 Sep** (153 nights) the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so the sky never reaches full darkness, and between roughly 23 Apr and 20 Aug it does not get properly dark at all — no display, however strong, is visible in that stretch.

The nights here do get genuinely dark — the sun bottoms out 48.6° below the horizon in midwinter. But for roughly 6 Apr to 5 Sep it never gets that low, and the sky stays too bright for anything but the strongest displays. The season is therefore defined by dark nights, not by calendar dates.

Where to go in Fairbanks

Roads out of town in almost any direction climb away from the valley haze. Cold, clear nights are the norm in deep winter, so the limiting factor is usually your own endurance rather than the sky.

Your viewing direction is fixed by Fairbanks's position relative to the magnetic pole: look north, low on the horizon at first, and find somewhere that side is open and unlit. The "best window" figure above is simply the first hour tonight where cloud cover falls under roughly 40% while the sky is dark enough here to show anything.

What Kp do you need in Fairbanks?

Kp is a planetary number, and the only way to read it usefully is against this city's own threshold. For Fairbanks that threshold is Kp 2, set by a magnetic latitude of 65°:

The most common reason people miss a display at this latitude is timing rather than strength: a Kp 2 night is enough, but substorms come and go inside a single Kp interval, so a 20-minute gap in your attention can be the whole show. Check the sky every 20–30 minutes rather than once.

How tonight's answer is calculated for Fairbanks

The score above is built from five weighted factors, each using Fairbanks's own figures rather than a regional default: Kp against a local threshold of 2 (35%), cloud cover averaged across the dark hours at 64.84°, -147.72° (25%), moon illumination (15%), this latitude's astronomical darkness window (15%) and Bortle 3 light pollution (10%). The scoring method, its inputs and its failure modes are written up in full on our methodology page. No account, no app, no email address — everything above is computed in your browser from NOAA and Open-Meteo data. Anonymous analytics and Google's advertising script are the only third parties involved, both explained on the privacy page.