How to see the Northern Lights from the UK TONIGHT

Stargazers are in for a colorful treat tonight as the Northern Lights will be visible across the UK.

Thanks to the arrival of a coronal mass ejection (CME), the spectacular light show could be visible today in the south of England.

This is a sudden release of plasma from the sun’s corona, the outermost part of the atmosphere, which is composed of charged particles.

These particles are guided to Earth by the magnetic field and appear as vibrant colors when they interact with our atmosphere.

According to Met Office data, strong solar winds — streams of charged particles — mean there’s a chance the lights could even be seen from south of Cambridge.

Earlier today, a large CME arrived at Earth after leaving the sun on Friday – they usually take about 15 to 18 hours to reach Earth.

Solar winds are likely to continue bombarding the UK tonight, according to the Met Office.

This will see the arrival of small to moderate solar storms, which have the potential to affect satellites and GPS systems in low Earth orbit.

Maps from the Met Office’s Space Weather arm predict activity from tonight 10pm BST to tomorrow morning 1am BST, but colors may still be visible in the north of Scotland into the early hours.

Met Office forecasters said: ‘The aurora is likely to be visible given favorable viewing conditions from central and northern parts of the UK and similar geomagnetic latitudes.

“There is a small chance of seeing auroral displays in the south of the UK.”

As of 10pm BST, the Met Office’s cloud cover map is likely to be an overcast night across most of Wales and southern England.

Over Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle, however, it will be largely clear.

Any clouds over north and south Wales, Birmingham and Nottingham will break up in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The aurora is also likely to be visible in the southern hemisphere, in the very south of South America and perhaps New Zealand’s South Island.

After tonight, the solar winds and storms from the CME will weaken.

While the Northern Lights are often visible from the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, they rarely grace the night sky further south.

Oxygen gives off green and red light, while nitrogen glows blue and purple, and the lights are more commonly seen in winter when nights are cold, long, and dark.

The energy and small particles of solar activity travel along the magnetic field lines to the poles of the Earth so that they appear strongest there.

But if the activity is really strong, these phenomena can be visible further away.

At the end of last month, a dramatic plasma ejection from the sun made the Northern Lights visible as far south as Wiltshire.

Plus, on the nights of February 26 and 27, two particularly strong CMEs caused stargazers in Cornwall to experience them too.

According to the British Geological Survey, the best way to see the Northern Lights is to find a dark spot away from street lights and ideally a cloudless sky.

Experts say skywatchers should generally look north, though the spectacular sight could be overhead or elsewhere.

In the north, the display is known as the aurora borealis, and in the south it is called the aurora australis.

The sun goes through an 11-year solar cycle in which the magnetic field becomes more or less active.

This, in turn, causes a fluctuating amount of activity on the sun’s surface.

Surface activity has been increasing since the last solar minimum in 2020, so our star is currently at its most active since 2014.

It is expected to reach solar maximum in 2025, so more of these aurora displays are expected in the coming months and years.

An example of this is the colossal “solar tornado” observed last month, which reached a height 14 times greater than Earth.

Composed of plasma and heat, the twister was more than 74,500 miles high and moved at up to 310,000 miles per hour.

In addition, late last month, a hole 20 times larger than Earth in the sun’s atmosphere was causing solar storms.

Coronal holes – a common phenomenon on the sun – are regions of open magnetic field from which solar wind hurtles into space at high speed.

They were first spotted by NASA’s Skylab in the early 1970s, but scientists are still not entirely sure what causes them.

They can appear at any time during the solar cycle, but they are most common during the descending phase.

This massive hole unleashed 1.8 million miles per hour solar winds toward Earth.