By Tim Querengesser

My favourite bit of cocktail party trivia about working at Up Here comes from our readership. A lot of our readers -- the majority in fact -- live in the south. When I drop this tidbit, I'm challenged to explain why it's so. In a nut, the reason is that former Northerners turned southerners, people who've visited here and fallen in love with the place, as well as the families of people who've decided to move here, all like to keep in touch with the North. Up Here is this diaspora-like community's periodical.

Yet if I were at a cocktail party in the south in the next, say, day or two, I'd instead drop this bit of Northern trivia: On August 3rd and 4th, there will be no need to go to Northern latitudes to see our Northern Lights.

Why? On Sunday, the sun erupted masses of plasma -- also known as a coronal mass ejection -- that are now traveling towards our atmosphere, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. As the Center explains, the Northern Lights (or aurora, if you prefer) are often only visible at high latitudes. That's because as the plasma interacts with the Earth's atmosphere, solar particles race towards the planet's magnetized poles. As they do this, they collide with nitrogen and oxygen. Cue bright lights.

When there is a big solar storm, however, even those in southern latitudes can see the Northern Lights. As the Center reports, "Sky watchers in the northern U.S. and other countries should look up toward the north on the evening of August 3rd/4th for rippling 'curtains' of green and red light."

So get your helping of the North in the south. It'll be like reading Up Here while in Toronto or Houston or Doha (yep, we've gotten letters from Qatar). Of course, once you get a taste our Lights, you'll still have to come up here for a second helping.