The northern lights, as they are this minute
Reading the sky.
This sky is drawn from live readings: the planet's geomagnetic activity sets how bright and how far south the curtains reach, and the solar wind sets how fast they move.
A sky drawn from real readings, not a live camera. Move the dial to imagine a different storm.
01 / From looking up to heading north
A sky worth travelling for.
You don’t need to be a storm chaser. Start with a place, leave a little room in your calendar, and give the sky a few nights to surprise you.
Choose an airport above or enter its three-letter code. These are starting points for planning, not package holidays.
Three places to start dreaming.
01 · PICK A POSSIBILITY
Give yourself a few nights.
Explore dates with darkness and time to try again. A longer stay gives you more opportunities to look up.
02 · KEEP THE DREAM
Save it. Send it. Sleep on it.
Keep a shortlist or send the exact dates to someone you’d like to travel with. No account required.
03 · FOLLOW THE SKY
Check again before you go.
Seasonal planning helps you choose dates. Short-range cloud and aurora forecasts help you decide when to head outside.
02 / A good reason to look again
Your airport.
Your kind of escape.
Keep an eye on the trip you actually want. Save a destination and a rough airfare budget, and leave room for a little spontaneity.
Choose “Watch for deals” on a trip to start.
Your northern-lights shortlist
Saved in this browser. Sharing a trip includes its airport and dates; email addresses are never included.
The oval
Where the lights are, right now.
NOAA's OVATION model turns the solar wind hitting Earth into a map of where aurora should be overhead in the next half hour. This is that map, loading, wrapped on a globe with the real day and night line. Drag to turn it.
Chance overhead, by place
Your location is only used in this page to read the map. It is not sent anywhere.
- Waiting for the forecast…
From the ground
A world worth looking up for.
Explore photographs from past nights and cameras pointed at polar skies. A beautiful past night is inspiration, not a promise for tonight.
Pins use source geotags where available; regional and station locations are marked approximate. Camera links open the operator’s viewer; availability and image time are shown there.
No layers selected. Turn on photos or cameras to explore.
Watch the oval move
The last 24 hours, on replay.
NOAA OVATION model frames, not camera footage or confirmed sightings. These are archived short-range forecasts; each image includes its observation and forecast times. Replay stays separate from the live globe above.
Choose a hemisphere, then load its replay.
No frame loaded.
Only the frame you view is downloaded. Playback loads frames as it goes.
About NOAA’s aurora model ↗Checking the globe snapshot archive…
The planner
Will you actually see them?
Seeing the lights takes four things at once: an active sky, real darkness, a gap in the cloud and not too much moon. The planner scores every night on all four, using a forecast where one exists and decades of records where it does not.
Built from the Kp record for 1996 to 2025 (how often each month is active enough for each place), five years of night-time cloud records for each place, and the exact darkness and moon phase for each night. These are unvalidated planning scores, not probabilities or forecasts. Long-range scores combine historical activity, cloud estimates, darkness and moon phase; they cannot predict a sighting.
The cause
A wind from the Sun, measured an hour before it lands.
A spacecraft sits 1.5 million km upstream of Earth and samples the solar wind as it goes past. Fast, dense wind with a southward magnetic field (negative Bz) is what lights the sky.
The Sun, right now.
The trigger
The ground feels it first.
When a display is about to brighten, electric currents surge through the sky and tug on Earth's magnetic field. Magnetometers under the oval record that as a sudden drop, often minutes before the sky erupts. These three are reporting live.
Each line is the northward field over the last six hours, shown as the change from its typical level in that window. The labels use rough thresholds: a swing of 60 nT in half an hour counts as stirring, 200 nT as a substorm. Readings are provisional and can lag by a few minutes to an hour.
The outlook
The last week, and the next three nights.
Kp is the planet-wide score for geomagnetic activity, from 0 to 9. At 5 it becomes a storm, and the lights start reaching places that rarely see them.
The desk
Straight from the forecasters.
The most recent alerts, watches and warnings issued by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.