Aurora Borealis
The
northern lights or
aurora borealis are predictable, but only in a limited and probabilistic fashion. The odds of an impressive display, and a display farther south than is normal, go up considerably in the wake of large solar flares or coronal mass ejections (CME), if Earth is in the path of the fast streaming ejected solar plasma. Unfortunately, the flares and CME are themselves only statistically predictable (there are more during the sun's active period and fewer during its quiet period, both of which are more predictable in an absolute sense). When there is a big flare that might set off an impressive aurora, you may only have a couple of days to get to aurora country or you will miss the show.
The best source for these short term predictions is
Spaceweather.com ("space weather" being the fairly obvious choice of jargon to describe the current conditions in the solar system plasma environment; temperature, solar wind speed & particle density, & etc.). At the moment, there is a warning out for high latitude sky watchers on January 19, when Earth should intercept the wind from a large CME that erupted on January 16. See, not a lot of lead time here.
Otherwise, the only thing I can think of is to plan a trip reasonably far north, say central Canada longitude, where you can get into relatively dark skies fairly quickly. Time the trip in the dead of winter, when nights are longest, and you risk bad weather. Time the trip in comfortable summer, when nights are almost non-existent (been there, done that), and you risk never seeing a sky dark enough. So I am thinking spring or fall when you might still have good luck with weather, and there are still real nights at hand. Of course, you want to avoid full moon if possible. Maybe you just want to rent a condo and hang around for a month or so and see what happens.
Best of luck, it's amazing to see. What got me was how fast something so huge was able to change as I watched.
