UKC

There is a major magnetic storm at the moment, and the skies should be cloud free from 9pm in the Peak. 

Might be worth a look, if you are bored with the telly. 

There’re red and green arcs stretching over > 200° of the sky here in north east England.  No fine structure at present but if it breaks out it’ll be spectacular.  First time I’ve really seen the colours by eye - once dark adapted.

sadly torrential rain here

Mobile phone shot.  Here on the border looking towards Langholm.  Gone now. But as you say, the red part was clearly visible in sky.

Fine structure is here, and it’s now enveloping about 270° of the sky.

Edit: actually all sky coverage, I can even see it due south - mono by eye colour by camera

Edit 2: I can now see colour and structure around the whole sky.  Got a classic photo of “curtains” too.  Ironically taking photos worsens dark adaption and naked eye visibility.

I just popped out for a look in Ayrshire but I think there's too much light pollution around. Didn't see any ☹️ 

This is the show my partner’s getting on Rügen in the Baltic, taken looking E over the last 30 min (iPhone unedited):

And as south as Leicestershire we also have it. Amazing the difference between the cloudy mist you see in life and what the camera captures. 

SweetPea possibly worth watching – started tonight!

Visible in north Sheffield

It's very bright here just north of Lancaster. Plenty of light pollution from my back garden but colours easily seen at a full 270 degrees, green and red and dancing pillars. Second only to the one in May with what I've encountered. Has been steadily increasing in intensity from 9pm to now (10.10pm).

Is it Venus rising behind? Was very red when near the horizon so I thought it was Mars but has changed to white as it has climbed.

From my bedroom in Standish, Wigan. 

Park in Berlin:

View over Anglesey just now

Stuck my head out in West Cumbria about 20mins ago. Lots or red and green, in an arc from Sw to NE. Faded now though.

Bloody hell !  Bet that’s a rare sight. My wife’s never seen them and is ecstatically overjoyed. 

County Durham just now 

Must get the tree chopped back.

View of them in Harrogate- intense red colours clearly visible with naked eye- and visible due south at one point. Astounding. 
 

But according to family, not visible in Central Scotland- and cloudy in Sweden… south best for northern lights it seems, ironically! 

Absolutely vivid in Edinburgh.

Nowt in Perth, I’m told 

maybe they weren’t looking the right direction (Up…!) 😆

My back garden in Bangor. Taken with my phone. 

In Edinburgh, they seemed strongest east and west; not north. Even with heavy light pollution, the red colour was clearly visible with the naked eye.

Only east-west over the water here in Fife. Nothing north or south.

Several times in the last year it’s seemed better to the west for me; I don’t know if that’s genuine or if it’s because we’ve got the Greater Geordie Metropolitan Area to our north.

A few more photos below; it was unreal standing atop a little local hill with this visible in all directions.  

Super display in Trawsfynydd.

Seemed really vivid reds and greens tonight

So I drive to a couple of darker spots within about a mile of home (N Manchester) - nada.

Come back home, we go out to back garden, clearly visible by eye, pink and green.

Drive back to one of the darker spots for half an hour - nada.

Seems like the non-dark garden's the place.

Industrial Merthyr Tydfil, by Ffos y fran, the recently closed open cast.

Sweet pea is worth a few dark laughs but after two episodes i think it's going to be a stabfest unless she changes her MO.

Some fantastic photos here.

In my bit of Reading, it's horizon to horizon stratocumulus, but I've seen good pictures captured not too far away.

https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/24644910.northern-lights-uk-stunnin...

Stunning in Sheffield right now 

Yep, I've just been out by my house, just over the border in Derbyshire - quite impressive, colour all around. 

Other than some green stripes due north, the structure has suddenly collapsed, but the entire rest of the sky is vivid red.

A challenging night to go to sleep on!  Feels like Christmas Eve when I was a kid.

These are spectacular! I've just been out staring at the sky for about 40 minutes....really should get back to work at some point

Youngest son and myself were in back garden, a few miles east of Stirling, lying in sleeping bags for a couple of hours. Excellent view with a really spectacular display from about 0030hrs with red, greens, streaks, rays, movement all over the sky - then it faded. No photos, just memories. Wordle, beer and bed.

Couldn't be Venus, too far from the sun. Must have been Jupiter, which was still visible an hour ago.

Jupiter was low and little bit north of east yesterday evening, very bright. So as Pete says, will be that.

Do we know if the display will continue for any more nights?

Yup. You can see it in my photo. 

I thought that was Wigan pier.

It kicked up after midnight again last night,  not the best of my photos below but I like it as it’s directly below a vertical ribbon or so it seems.  A perspective we don’t normally get!

Hopeful about tonight 

That shot with the tree is superb, what a result!

On spaceweather it suggested 15-24hrs, so we'll be lucky if it continues into a second night, but estimates have been wrong before.

Supposed to be good again tonight but cloudy here in Newcastle

These were in Nottingham at 12:30 last night

I missed the best of it last night, as I had some work that really needed finished, but even by the time I got out it was spectacularly visible to the naked eye despite the light pollution in Newcastle. Got some nice pictures with the phone.

My partner was out on the roof earlier with the DSLR and should have some really good pictures.

Were those taken close to the time you posted? I'm just south of you and went to bed shortly after 11pm as it looked like they were weakening a bit and my phone battery had died. Was a bit gutted to see the signal spiked again at midnight when I got up.

More generally, how are people getting such good photos with their phones? My images (Samsung S10e) were pretty crap. It looked like they were directly overhead, could just make out some colour in my photos using night mode, but nothing like any of the pictures posted here.

I use the night sight function on my pixel phone. Can't attach images here for some reason but pretty good.

I was struggling with long hand held exposures with an old Lumix, 15 seconds is a long time to hold your breath and keep still in the middle of a road!

Apart from the intense reds visible with the naked eye 2 things stood out. 

The most intense reds were aligned approximately E W

To the South high up there was a  "Death Ray" beam that ran E/W and varied in luminosity and colour.

Colour to the North was much less intense and greenish.

Are these E/W phenomena anything to do with the time of arrival of the CME material relative to the observation time and place?

It was fine in East Ayrshire, visible with the naked aye and some good photos showed off the full effect

Missed them last night - shame, as they don't normally get this far South

I think it's mostly just down to throwing more money at a good camera phone. I'm on a Samsung S24 Ultra, and got decent photos just handheld in night mode.

It was incredible here (S Wales) from about 00:20 when the G5 geomagnetic storm conditions arrived. Whole sky was glowing in about 180 degree arc looking North. I think the really bright red picture was as it peaked, I haven't adjusted this at all.

I'm certainly no expert, so this could be completely wrong, but I think they are normally aligned approximately E-W from the magnetic pole, but how far south they reach is dependent on the strength of the solar flare. So normally at our lattitudes they appear as an arc to the north as they haven't extended that far south, but last night it was strong enough that they were more or less directly overhead, hence aligning E-W.

I think the 'death ray' might have been Steve! That was visible over Aberdeenshire on Monday night.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c4g0j7zn813o

21:45 to 22:15 Mike. It turned cloudy from that time so I went in. Looks like I missed some more intense displays after midnight.

Probably they are too big. If I try to upload direct from my Pixel 7a, it normally refuses because I think the file sizes are too big.

One from last night

Yes, that looks very like it.  We joked about it being a Nexus like Star Trek "Generations" but I see it looks even more like that in one of the photos in your link.

We saw it in the Eden Valley and there was something to the South of us high in the sky during the huge display earlier in the year so Steve may have been over Cumbria as well as the NE then as well.   On both occasions it could be seen probably roughly in the plane the planets and sun follow which is why I wondered about it being to do with the arrival of something coming from the Sun in that plane.

I stood out for an hour last night, saw bugger all. Notts.

Saw it purely by accident Thurs night. Great show from our back yard in Stoke, with the additional thrioll of an owl hooting in the tree behind us.

Night mode on a recent iPhone - it takes lots of seperate short(ish) exposures, then aligns and averages them. This improves the signal to noise whilst reducing motion blur from it being hand held.  The live view does similar processing which helps decide where to look.

Holding the phone very steady still helps, and limiting the maximum “exposure” to 2-3 seconds helps when there’s fine structure, as the structure is dynamic on slower timescales meaning any details will blur out due to their changing on longer exposures.

Another from Thursday, this one looking almost straight up, slightly sw if anything.