For the self-described Aurora Chasers of Fairbanks, tonight is like a Christmas present from the solar system.

Even Ronn Murray, a sleep-deprived Fairbanks photographer and new dad to a three-week-old son, is planning on spending the night outside in -25 degree temperatures to capture what experts are predicting will be an "extreme" aurora, the fallout from one of the strongest geomagnetic space storms in a decade.

"In the last couple of days I've slept less than 10 hours total," Murray said. "But I'm wide awake. The adrenaline is kicking in here."

(His wife has given his plan her blessing, he said.)

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has predicted "highly active" auroral displays visible over many parts of Alaska, from Barrow all the way to Ketchikan. The displays are expected to taper off by Thursday.

The aurora should be visible in Southcentral Alaska, including Anchorage, weather permitting. The weather tonight doesn't look great: the National Weather Service calls for partly cloudy skies with patchy fog or low clouds forming after midnight.

For the past week, solar storms of a magnitude unseen in the last decade have been raging in space, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

The impacts of the storm have been rolling down to the earth atmosphere in the form of strong auroras for days, lighting up Interior skies with sometimes ghostly, sometimes explosive displays.

"I've been chasing for five years," Murray said. "And this is the best I've ever seen."

Big solar events that happened on Jan. 23 will arrive in aurora form tonight, some 12-24 hours later, according to the NOAA, making it a night with special potential.

Murray and a small cadre of other hardcore aurora photographers who met on Twitter and Facebook gather on most nights when a display is predicted.

They seek spots -- like local favorites Ester Dome and Murphy Dome -- that offer a wide blanket of sky. Sometimes that means driving 30 or 40 miles out the Steese Highway.

Then, in temperatures that can dip into the -40s, they watch and photograph from 8 p.m. until 6 or 7 in the morning, huddling inside cars to get warm and snacking on beef jerky and granola. The trick is "many, many layers" of clothing, Murray said.

He takes hundreds of images per night, some stills, some time lapses, shooting with a professional-grade Canon SLR camera and selling his images on his website.

But he says he mostly does it because, even after five years of aurora chasing, a starry sky lit up with Northern Lights still moves him.

"It just makes you feel so little," he said.

The group -- which numbers between three and a half-dozen - may head up the Dalton Highway, Murray said.

The National Weather Service is predicting some clouds in the Fairbanks area. Murray is hoping there won't be a repeat of last fall, when strong auroras were obscured by cloud cover.

"That was torture," he said.

He hopes he'll take a lot of pictures tonight.

During the long nights of photographing auroras he'll occasionally be overwhelmed by the lights enough to stop clicking the camera.

Sometimes, he said, he just stops and looks up.