Despite what you see on Instagram, you don't have to make a pilgrimage to Iceland or Scandinavia to get a prime view of the Northern Lights. One of the best places in North America to see the aurora—that colorful solar wind of exploding, electrified plasma, like a green flag waving in the sky—is Alberta, Canada. This western province is home to the Jasper National Park which, at 4,200 square miles, is home to one of the world's largest dark-sky preserves, a stretch of land free of light pollution. People who are passionate about stargazing say Alberta's auroras are on par with Iceland's and other spots that ring the earth's magnetic poles.
Alberta has two other preserves—Beaver Hills, east of Edmonton, and Cypress Hills on the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta—but Jasper (a four-hour drive from Edmonton) is arguably the cushiest place to see the Northern Lights. Queen Elizabeth stayed here in 2005 at the luxe Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge. And there are plenty of other things to do in and around the town of Jasper (population 5,000) besides look at the skies, including snowshoeing, dog sledding, and skiing/snowboarding at the park’s Marmot Basin Ski Resort, which has an impressive vertical descent of 3,000 feet and 86 runs.
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But how does any of that compete with "nature’s IMAX," as Peter McMahon, a manager at the Jasper Planetarium, calls it? “The Aurora Borealis is the closest you or I will ever get to touching a star,” he says. “In a way, it’s the sun, our local star, reaching out to 'tickle' Earth’s atmosphere. Though we have Northern Lights all year round, one of the better times to see them up here is winter because we have many more hours of darkness.”
McMahon said the aurora appears on a fairly regular basis above Jasper, with a heavenly display that fills nearly the entire sky every ten days or so. When there are no Northern Lights, thousands of stars emerge that are relatively easy to spot. In fact, he says, there are so many stars that it can be difficult for city dwellers (which means most of us) to pick out the Big Dipper or Orion’s Belt when they go to the preserve.
“People come from all over the world to see Jasper,” he says. “One woman from Shanghai, China was so overcome by the stars that she broke down and cried. Her husband said she’d been ‘born too late,’ after the industrialization of Shanghai made seeing the stars all but impossible. We ended up showing her other galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters through telescopes in the planetarium and she was amazed. Eventually, she stopped crying.”