Ben Pierce Sees the Northern Lights in Fairbanks, Alaska: A Boy's Wish

A small figure raises his arms under a sky lit green by the aurora borealis. In autumn 2014 nine-year-old Ben Pierce from Texas, who was slowly losing his sight, travelled to Fairbanks, Alaska, to see the northern lights while he still could, thanks to an airline captain who heard his story on the news.

Ben Pierce and his visual wish list

Ben was born four months premature, weighing just over a pound, and was diagnosed with retinopathy of prematurity at two months old. Surgery on his eyes as a baby left scar tissue, and his vision has declined steadily since. His family lives near Dallas, in Lake Dallas, Texas.

With the help of his doctors, Ben made a "visual wish list" of things he wanted to see before his sight faded. By October 2014 it had 56 entries. Twenty-three were already ticked off, including the Dallas Zoo, NASA, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, New York City, a cave and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Still to come were London's Big Ben, London Eye and Tower Bridge, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Grand Canyon, Antarctica, Washington, D.C., skiing and snorkelling.

How an Alaska Airlines pilot made it happen

In spring 2014, Alaska Airlines Captain Chris Cice was in Dallas on a trip when he heard about Ben on the news. A few weeks later, Cice and the airline surprised the family with tickets to Fairbanks, which Alaska Airlines calls one of the best places in the world to see the northern lights.

The family stayed at Chena Hot Springs, about 90 kilometres north-east of Fairbanks, a resort popular for aurora viewing and home to the Aurora Ice Museum. Ben also rode with a sled-dog team. Then the lights came out. "I still can't believe we saw them," his mother, Heidi Thaden-Pierce, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

What causes the northern lights

The aurora begins at the Sun. Charged particles carried on the solar wind are steered by Earth's magnetic field towards the poles, where they strike gas atoms high in the atmosphere and make them glow. Most auroras shine above 80 kilometres, peaking at around 100 kilometres.

• Green, the most common colour, comes from oxygen at lower altitudes.
• Red comes from oxygen at the highest altitudes and is usually seen only during strong solar activity.
• Where: the auroral zone is a band about 660 kilometres wide, centred on 67 degrees north and south. Fairbanks sits close beneath it.
• When: geomagnetic storms tend to be more frequent around the equinoxes, and big displays are most common near the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle.

Plan several nights in a row when chasing the aurora; clouds and quiet solar weather can hide it on any single night.

Explore Ronn Murray’s northern-lights photography for more of the Alaskan sky, or compare Lapland’s aurora landscapes.

Related reading

• Kwon O Chul’s Yellowknife Aurora Gallery
• Kaspars Daleckis’s Latvian Aurora Time-Lapse
• Ten Northern-Lights Regions: Geography, Darkness and Realistic Expectations
• Aurora from Norway, Alaska and Orbit

Sources