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Live aurora outlook · multi-source
NOAA SWPC · AuroraWatch UK · Kp nowQuiet across the next three nights.
NOAA SWPC 3-day Kp forecast peaks at Kp 3.3 on tonight. AuroraWatch UK reading green — magnetometers quiet. Kp now 2.00.
3-night Kp peak
- TonightquietKp peak 3.3Below UK threshold
- Tomorrow nightquietKp peak 2.7Below UK threshold
- FridayquietKp peak 2.7Below UK threshold
Reality check
Kp now
2.00
quiet · 63 min old
AuroraWatch UK
green
via prism
Forecast vs reality
Match
Tonight: quiet
Reality matches the forecast tier — Kp now 2.00 is consistent with the quiet call for tonight.
Three independent signals, no single point of failure. Skill verification (predicted vs observed aurora per night) is on the bench — aurora ground truth needs different sources than the convective stack. Full live state and Bz / solar-wind detail on the aurora dashboard.
Field guide
Chasing the aurora
The northern lights are visible from the UK more often than people think — but the signal is buried in two layers of forecasting and three layers of weather. Here's how aurora chasing actually works at our latitude, what the numbers on the dashboard mean, and what to set alerts on.
What you're actually chasing
The aurora is the visible signature of charged solar particles colliding with oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. The particles arrive in two main flavours: a steady solar wind that picks up speed when the Sun rotates a coronal hole into geo-effective position, and discrete coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — billion-tonne bubbles of plasma launched by solar flares and active regions on the disk. Both can drive the auroral oval far enough south to put us in business.
What you see from the UK depends on which species the particles excite and how energetic they are. Green is the most common — the 557.7 nm oxygen line at around 100 km altitude. The red top fringe comes from a slower, higher-altitude oxygen transition at 200–300 km; it's the colour we see from southern England when the oval edge sneaks down. Magenta is nitrogen lit from the bottom of an active band. The structure people associate with the textbook postcards — vertical rays, fast-moving curtains, pulsating patches — is what happens when Kp climbs past about 5 and Bz tips steadily south.
The numbers that matter
Kp index is a planetary geomagnetic activity scale running 0 to 9. Anything 4 or below is quiet; 5 is the G1 minor-storm threshold and the practical floor for visibility from northern Scotland; 6–7 (G2–G3) brings the oval edge down to northern England and Wales; 8–9 (G4–G5) is when cameras across the whole UK and into northern France start picking up colour overhead.
Bzis the north–south component of the interplanetary magnetic field carried by the solar wind. When Bz tips southward — negative values, sustained for tens of minutes — it couples efficiently with Earth's field and pours particles into the oval. A storm with strong wind but Bz pointing north is a quiet night; a moderate storm with Bz at -10 nT for an hour can outperform it.
Oval equatorward edgeis the OVATION model's estimate of how far south the visible auroral band currently reaches. Under 60° N means Scotland is in the oval; 57° N puts the Borders inside it; below 55° N is when cameras in central England catch glow on the horizon.
The realistic UK latitude question
Northern Scotland sits around 58° N — closer to the Aurora Belt than anywhere else in the British Isles. Shetland is closer still at 60°. Pretty much any night with Kp 4+ and clear sky is worth a look from there; G1 (Kp 5) means structured arcs are likely, G2 and above is when the colour gets dramatic.
Edinburgh, the Highlands, and the rest of central Scotland are roughly 55–57° N. The threshold is closer to Kp 5–6 for naked-eye colour, with cameras catching faint glow earlier. The Lake District, Northumberland, and the North York Moors are the next tier south; Kp 6 events show up here on clear nights with a low northern horizon. Southern England — London, the South Coast, Cornwall — needs Kp 7 or above for visible colour overhead, but phone cameras at f/1.8 with night mode can pick up structure at Kp 6 in dark-sky pockets.
The biggest UK-specific complication is cloud. A G3 event with overcast skies is a write-off; a G1 event with crystal-clear air from Northumberland is worth driving for. The chase decision usually collapses to two questions: is the geomagnetic forecast good enough that we're inside the oval, and where on the map is the cloud thin enough to look through?
The chase calendar
The auroral season is essentially the dark season. From the UK that means mid-September through to early April. Mid-summer is useless even with a G5 event — astronomical twilight never ends in Scotland in June. Late autumn and equinox months (September and March) statistically deliver more events because Earth's tilt and the heliospheric current sheet line up favourably — the so-called Russell–McPherron effect.
We're also still close to the peak of Solar Cycle 25 — one of the more active cycles in the last few decades. That elevated background lasts for another two or three years before declining activity rolls into the next solar minimum.
What to do when an alert fires
Get away from sodium lights. The aurora is dim — even a Kp 6 event from southern UK reads as a green-grey wash to the naked eye unless it's actively spiking, and the photograph almost always shows more colour than the eye does. A dark-sky pocket with an open northern horizon beats a closer location with a town behind you.
On camera, the default starting point is roughly ISO 1600–3200, f/2.8 or wider, 5–15 seconds. Phones with night mode (iPhone Pro, Pixel, recent Samsung) handle the long exposure automatically and often outperform what you can see with the eye. Don't dismiss a faint grey smudge in the north until you've taken a frame.
Set alerts on AuroraWatch UK and SpaceWeatherLive. The chaseit live dashboard fuses NOAA SWPC, OVATION-Prime, ACE/DSCOVR solar wind, and ground magnetometers into a single readout; refresh it the evening of, not three days out.
Want the long-form advisories?
When a CME watch is worth setting an alarm for, we publish it in space weather with the timing, the threat tier, and a plain-English read of why we think this one's worth chasing. Subscribe to the Aurora & space weather alertstopic on the homepage digest widget and you'll get an email the moment one fires.