good luck with that Liz! yes
autumn and spring are best times, due to complicated reasons but they still occur outside of those times as we recently seen .. i followed the last cycle (23)/solar max intently and went aurora chasing quite a bit .. so many ducks have to line up, number one for mainland viewing being huge x class flares having occured, but there are exceptions, but the big rarer x flares usually can produce aurora that go (on and off) for 48 hours, so you get a big window .. the other thing is the
downside of graph from solar max is the best, so for a couple of years after max year, plenty of sun activity .. but as you can see from graph solar maxs are getting progressively quieter .. but having said that last solar max cycle 23 produced some of the biggest flares recorded! like the x-17 of oct 2003,
its true that southern tassie and south island NZ are best spots in our part of the world, if they get clear weather, even small shows are impressive .. but i followed the last cycle max as i said, and maybe more than 50% of the time, and this goes for southern Victoria as well, when a
really big rarer show was on, those prime spots were clouded out .. and we werent .. also southern western australia is pretty good too, they might have on average even clearer weather than us in the wheatbelt .. even southern nsw did much better than vic with regards to actually getting to see the more famous shows..
they really need to start a southern aurora boat viewing service, closer to antartica? .. like they do for whales and the like, so they can sail out from under clouds?
another thing the best peaks of the best nights, i witnessed, 3/4's of them were close to dawn! soooo thats not going to suit everyone
heres an old thread with some details of displays i got to see last time, the biggest best one i saw was april 12 2001, i was only person in southern hemisphere that saw and reported it! but it was some kind of freak sub-storm no one expected to be that good, its at bottom of this page..
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ead.php?t=3294