Can I see the northern lights tonight?
This page renders the real auroral oval — the ring of light around each magnetic pole — live from NOAA’s OVATION model, updated every few minutes. Enter your location above for a straight answer: will the aurora reach your sky tonight, and when to look.
The aurora is not weather. It is the sky itself glowing, where particles from the Sun pour down Earth’s magnetic field lines and strike the upper atmosphere about 100 kilometres overhead. Oxygen gives the green and the deep red; nitrogen adds the violet at the base of the curtains. The brighter the storm, the further from the poles the ring spreads, and the further south you can stand and still look up into it.
How this forecast is built
Three live measurements decide whether you see anything:
- The oval — NOAA’s OVATION model, the glowing ring you see on the globe. Where its edge reaches your latitude, the aurora is overhead.
- The storm level (Kp) — a 0 to 9 scale of geomagnetic activity. Higher Kp pushes the ring toward the equator. Around Kp 5 the lights reach the northern United States; at Kp 7 and above they can be seen much further south.
- The solar wind — speed, density, and especially Bz, the north–south tilt of the Sun’s magnetic field. When Bz turns strongly southward, the door opens and the aurora ignites.
Your verdict then adds two things every other number ignores: whether the sky is actually dark where you are tonight, and whether the moon is bright enough to wash the faint light out.
Best time to look
The aurora is usually strongest around local magnetic midnight — roughly the darkest hours, 10pm to 2am. Get away from city light, give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust, and look toward the pole: north in the northern hemisphere, south below the equator. A camera will catch colour your eye cannot.
Where the lights reach
On a quiet night the ring hugs the Arctic — Alaska, northern Canada, Iceland, northern Scandinavia. During strong storms it sweeps south across the northern U.S., the U.K., and on rare great storms as far as the mid-latitudes. The same ring glows around Antarctica as the aurora australis.
The great storms
When the oval has come all the way down to meet us, it has left a mark on history — telegraphs on fire, a power grid down in ninety seconds, a crimson sky over the tropics. The chips along the bottom of the globe replay those nights; The Aurora Center tells the full account of each, beginning with the Carrington Event of 1859, the strongest storm ever recorded.
Sky Intel · Know the night it reaches you
Great storms arrive with little warning, usually on a work night. Magna Earth keeps the oval under watch over your exact coordinates and tells you the hour it crosses into your sky, so you step outside at the right moment instead of hearing about it after.
Data: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — OVATION Prime aurora model, planetary Kp index and forecast, and DSCOVR / propagated solar wind. Darkness and moon computed for your location. Rendered live by Magna Historia. Times shown are the data’s own observation and forecast timestamps; nothing here is simulated. Sound: “Natural VLF Radio Reception” by awg (Freesound, CC BY 4.0).