Where and when to see the Northern Lights as Aurora borealis fills the night sky
13 August 2024, 15:46
Tonight marks the second consecutive day the Northern Lights could be visible.
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Stargazers will get another chance to catch the Northern Lights tonight after the sky was lit up by the stunning sight on Monday.
Last night saw both the Aurora Borealis and Perseid meteor shower fill the UK’s Sky, but fear not if you missed it.
AuroraWatchUK has issued a red alert for high geometric activity, which causes the Northern Lights to appear, between 9pm and 11pm this evening.
Those in the North of England, Northern Ireland and Scotland are most likely to see the lights
If you are eager to see the lights, head to a low-light area away from towns or cities.
Experts advise to lay down on your back and look up at the sky, giving your eyes some time to adjust to light.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the best aurora views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.
This comes just months after Brits were treated to a massive display caused by a huge slar storm.
The Northern Lights were visible across much of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, northern England and Wales in May.
At the time, Krista Hammond, a space weather expert for the Met Office, said: "We had a quite enormous sunspot, about 15 times the size of the Earth, on the Earth-facing side of the sun.
"It was releasing a lot of solar flares and coronal mass ejections which are enormous eruptions of charged particles."
The last time a storm of that magnitude took place was 21 years ago.
Monday saw the night sky lit up by the Perseid meteor shower, a yearly event which sees hundreds of shooting stars become visible.
According to astronomers, the meteors made their way to our skies from the constellations of Camelopardalis and Perseus, from which their name is derived.
When these meteor fragments, which are typically the size of a grain of sand, reach the Earth’s atmosphere, the air around them becomes compressed forcing them to burn up and causing bright streaks in the night sky.
