The Northern Lights could be visible across parts of the UK sky tonight, treating skygazers to a rare sight of the phenomenon.
The Met Office forecast suggests the display, called the Aurora Borealis, could be visible to the naked eye along the northern horizon from Scotland – where skies are clear, and may even be seen briefly in Northern Ireland and northern England.
A minor enhancement to the auroral oval – the range of the polar lights – is responsible for the display being visible so far south this week.
Professor Don Pollacco, department of physics at the University of Warwick, said it would be difficult to predict exactly where the Northern Lights would be visible.
READ MORE: Scotland weather: Why did it rain so much this year?
He said: “To predict exactly where you can see the Northern Lights is difficult as conditions can change quickly.
“However, one thing is for sure, and that is that you are unlikely to see them from a brightly lit city environment – you need to go somewhere dark and look towards the northern horizon (look for the North Star).
“So, you would preferably be in the countryside away from street lights. Of course it also needs to clear.”
Explaining what the lights are, he added: “The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) are caused by the interaction of particles coming from the sun, the solar wind, with the Earth’s atmosphere – channelled to the polar regions by the Earth’s magnetic field.
“It’s actually a bit like iron filings and the field of a bar magnetic.
“The solar wind contains more particles when there are sun spots, as these are regions on the sun’s surface where the magnetic field is interacting with the plasma in the Sun, and the particles can be released.
“Once the particles are channelled into the Earth’s atmosphere they interact with molecules and have distinctive colours (eg oxygen molecules produce green light, nitrogen red light etc) and patterns such as light emissions that look like curtains or spotlights.
“These shapes over change quickly over timescales of minutes/seconds.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here