NCL itineraries for Northern Lights?

[garnet115]

I know sightings are never guaranteed, but wondering if anyone has ever seen the lights while on an NCL cruise.  If so, what itinerary and month? Thanks!

[transoceanic]

May 2024, Vancouver to Tokyo via Alaska, NCL Spirit. The G5 storm the night of May 10th. It was at its peak around 1 to 2am. It was unreal. I've been up north many times. This was the most intense Auroras I've seen.

[bonvoyagie]

Cruises to Greenland, Iceland, and Northern Europe have the best chances.

[9tee2Sea]

22 hours ago, garnet115 said:

I know sightings are never guaranteed, but wondering if anyone has ever seen the lights while on an NCL cruise.  If so, what itinerary and month? Thanks!

There is an app that I use called My Aurora forecast.  It shows a graph like map ( like a weather map showing the progress of cold fronts) of where to expect the Northern Lights.  It will give you a good idea of where to expect to see them.  

[pghflyer]

The biggest thing you can control is choosing to go when there will be longer / darker nights - so i the northern hemisphere (for northern lights), that means trying to avoid May - August.  This will increase your chances significantly....the rest is pure luck (clouds, solar storms, ship lighting). 

We just got off NCL Star and saw Northern Lights in Iceland, they even have a TV channel that you can tune to in the evening and it will stay (relatively) dark and no sound unless the lights are available and then it will alert you.  We found that even with the TV backlight and brightness at Zero, it was still distracting to our sleep....but it did work.  

 

Assume you know you very rarely can see the lights with your native eyes and will really only see the colors via your cell phone. Otherwise they just look kind of cloudy/ hazy........FWIW

[www3traveler]

This season of the  year, you can sometimes see them on Alaskan cruises.  So far, this year the Northern Lights have been visible all the way South to the Seattle, Washington area over the last couple of weeks.

[Asawi]

I can tell when/where NOT to go:

I was in northern Norway in July last year and heard fellow passengers ask about Northern Lights... Hint: it needs to be dark. 😮

Alaska April we had some.

I wasn't out cruising last week, but I live near Oslo and we had awesome auroras. I bet it would have been even better en route to Iceland!