The skies of Britain and Ireland were painted in green, purple and deep red Sunday night, as the spectacular auroras, typical of remote latitudes, became visible as south as Kent or Cornwall.
Some Britons managed to get a glimpse of the colorful glow of the northern lights from their homes, something that usually requires long travels and overnight camping in ice-covered strips of Greenland or Iceland, or the northern parts of Scandinavia.
Joel Rabinowitz, 26, left his home in St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London, Sunday night to go to a nearby forest when he heard that the northern lights might be visible across Britain. To his surprise, he saw the aurora’s pink flush above the dark trees.
“I would have never expected that to happen here,” said Mr. Rabinowitz, who had taken trips to Norway and Finland to see the northern lights before. “It was crazy really.”
Pictures shared online showed a bright green glow that seemed to be radiating from the grassy hilltops of Scotland. Others showed pink shades filling the sky behind the Neolithic site of Stonehenge in England and above the sharp cliffs on the coast of Ireland. The northern lights were seen across Sussex and Wales; above a cemetery; and from bedroom windows, backyards, a university and even planes.
It is quite common for northern lights to be spotted in Scotland and parts of Northern England, but it is much rarer to see them in southern parts of England. The display on Sunday was one of the best in a very long time, according to the BBC’s weather watchers, a crowdsourced weather club.
The northern lights are produced by charged particles from the sun that hit Earth’s magnetic field. They are generally visible by the poles, but if the geomagnetic storm is particularly strong, the particles can travel farther south, experts told The New York Times this year.
The European Space Agency said that Sunday night, an expulsion of material from the sun arrived at Earth just as a high-speed solar wind stream whipped through the space around our planet.
In recent years, auroras have also been spotted in some parts of the United States. In 2017, an aurora was visible in the Upper Midwest, and in 2011, some northern lights were seen as far south as Alabama. The northern lights were also visible in some parts of the United States on Sunday night, as well as Canada and the Netherlands.
According to the Meteorological Office, Britain’s national weather service, the lights might be visible again Monday night. The BBC Weather Service said that the solar activity remained high on Monday. A clear night, far from urban light pollution, is also necessary to see the lights, but chances of spotting them increase during peaks of the solar cycle, which we are now approaching.
The sun has 11-year-long sunspot cycles, during which the level of ferocity in its magnetic fields grows and the sun ejects increasingly larger pieces of its atmosphere. We are now in the more active half of the cycle, with the next solar maximum predicted for 2025.