By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

What does seeing the Northern Lights for the first time feel like?

If you live any place that has earthquakes, you’ll know. It’s like feeling your first quake. As the night begins to shimmer, as ribbons of green light unroll across the stars, you have that feeling you get when the earth starts to tremble beneath you. Something you’ve taken for granted all your life is more astonishing than you ever imagined.

As amazing experiences go, the Northern Lights have this advantage over quakes: they won’t make anything fall down on you.  Speaking as someone who had an entire bookshelf land near him in San Francisco’s 1989 Loma Prieta quake, I find this a plus.

Northern Lights tourism has become a big deal in the last few years -- prompted, in part, by Patricia Schultz’ 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which mentions them as  must-sees. In Norway, there are Northern Lights ocean cruises, and Canada’s Yukon has emerged as an aurora tourism center.

But I like Fairbanks, Alaska for lights viewing. Fairbanks has all the geographic essentials. It’s way far north -- 65 latitude.

That’s important. Caused by the solar wind hitting earth’s magnetic field, the aurora borealis centers around earth’s northern magnetic pole, so the farther north you are, the more lights activity there is. It has those looong Alaska winter nights. (Aurora activity goes on in summer, too, but you can’t see the lights in daytime. And Alaska summers have a lot of daytime.)

Also important: Because Fairbanks is inland, and ringed by mountains that block Alaska’s winter storms, winter nights tend to be less cloudy than elsewhere in the state. 

Seeing the aurora is always a gamble, but long cloudless nights help. Fairbanks tourism people say that if you stay 3 nights you have good odds of getting a viewing.  The scientists at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute Fairbanks -- also a world center of scientific study of the borealis -- say that February and March tend to have the best viewing conditions.

(If you become a complete aurora nerd -- and this is remarkably easy to do -- you will find yourself bookmarking the Geophysical Institute’s aurora forecast page.)   

Finally, Fairbanks has gone in for aurora tourism in a big way. Because, frankly, before the aurora boomlet hit, there weren’t a whole lot of tourists coming to Fairbanks in the winter.

Now there are, and Fairbanks would like even more. So area hotels and resorts are making it as easy as possible to take in the show.

How to plan your trip:

Start with Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau. Their site has an entire section devoted to winter visits and the northern lights. 

Getting there: Alaska Airlines flies into Fairbanks year-round; Delta and Northwest operate summer only.

Where to stay

There are hotels in downtown Fairbanks, but if you’re going to go all this way you should stay in a place that’s set up for northern lights viewing. Here are three:

Chena Hot Springs Resort. About 55 miles outside of Fairbanks, Chena may be the premiere place in the world to see the lights. No place works so hard to make sure you do--hauling you in a Snow Coach up to a mountain top yurt with a commanding view over half of interior Alaska. If the lights are going off anywhere, you can see them from here.

Chena has some other good winter attractions, too -- notably dogsled rides and the Aurora Ice Museum, where you can sit and order an apple martini in an ice martini glass while sitting on an ice barstool. And then, because you’ve just frozen your butt off, you can warm up in the hot springs that gives the resort its name.

A Taste of Alaska Lodge. Pretty bed and breakfast with good aurora viewing from adjacent field. 

The Aurora Borealis Lodge offers night time tours ($75) to see the lights--they’ll pick you up at your hotel and take you out to a handsome lodge with a deck for viewing the show. Now they’re building cabins for overnight guests; these should be finished this winter.   

Other attractions for aurora fans

University of Alaska Museum of the North. This is one of my favorite museums anywhere. First off, it’s beautiful -- a knife-sharp building that gleams like an iceberg in the low winter sun. The exhibits inside are just as good: first-rate Alaskan art (native, historic, contemporary), lots of Alaska natural history. And, incredibly cool, The Place Where You Go to Listen, a sound and light environment that mimics the movements of the aurora and the seismic activity of the Alaskan earth.

World Ice Art Championships. Ice dragons, ice mazes, ice everything. If you’re here in March, you need to see this -- you’ll never look at your ice cube tray in the same way again. Not quite as impressive as the aurora, but then what is?

More: Discover wild Alaska