Northern Lights Map: Live Aurora Tracker

How to Read This Aurora Map

The coloured band is the aurora oval. Faint green means a low probability of aurora directly overhead; yellow and pink mean a strong, likely display. Inside the band, people under a clear dark sky have a good chance of seeing aurora.

The viewing line marks the furthest point from the pole where the aurora is likely to be seen, usually low on the northern horizon. If you are a little south of the band but north of the line, look low toward the north.

The shaded area is the night side of Earth. Aurora happens around the clock, but you can only see it where it is dark. As the Earth rotates, North America, Europe, and Asia each pass under the oval during their night.

Tap or click a place marker to open its forecast with hourly cloud cover, because the map does not know whether your sky is clear.

What Is the Aurora Oval?

The aurora borealis (northern lights) and aurora australis (southern lights) appear in two rings around the magnetic poles. Charged particles from the solar wind are guided by Earth’s magnetic field into those rings. Where they hit the upper atmosphere, 100–300 km up, oxygen glows green and red and nitrogen glows blue and purple. That ring is the auroral oval.

When geomagnetic activity is quiet (Kp 0–2), the oval sits over northern Alaska, northern Canada, Iceland, and northern Scandinavia. During a storm it widens and moves toward the equator. At Kp 5 (a G1 storm) it reaches southern Canada and the northern US border; at Kp 8–9 it can be seen from much of the United States and central Europe.

OVATION uses live solar wind measurements from a spacecraft about 1.5 million km upstream, at the L1 point, to estimate where the aurora will be in roughly the next 30 to 90 minutes. That makes it the best short-term guide, while the Kp forecast is better for planning hours or days ahead.

Northern Lights Tracker Tips

Use the map to decide now, and the hourly forecast to decide later. If the oval is bright over you and the sky is clear, go outside immediately. Displays can fade within minutes.

Watch the trend. If the band is growing and shifting toward you over several refreshes, a substorm may be building. Strongly southward Bz on the space weather page often comes just before that.

Cloud cover is not on the oval layer. Check the cloud percentage for your place on the forecast before driving out, and the 3-day aurora forecast if you are planning ahead.

From mid-latitudes, aurora often looks like a grey or faint green glow on the horizon to the eye. A phone in night mode will show the colour.

Where the Aurora Usually Appears

On a quiet night (Kp 0–2) the oval passes over central and northern Alaska, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec and Labrador, southern Greenland, Iceland, and the north of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Fairbanks, Yellowknife, Reykjavík, Tromsø, Abisko, and Rovaniemi see aurora on most clear, dark nights from late August to April.

During a moderate storm (Kp 5–6) it spreads over Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, the northern US border states, Scotland, and southern Scandinavia. Only strong storms (Kp 7 and above) bring it over most of the United States, England, Germany, and Poland.

The southern oval mirrors this around Antarctica, reaching Tasmania, southern New Zealand, and Patagonia during storms. This map focuses on the northern hemisphere, where most viewers live.