Northern lights in Edinburgh: tonight’s chance

Scotland's capital, magnetically farther south

Edinburgh shares its geographic latitude with Moscow and with the southern tip of Alaska's panhandle, yet on the aurora's scale it is closer to Seattle. The reason is the position of the magnetic pole, which lies over Arctic Canada: places on the European side of the globe are farther from it, magnetically, than their latitude suggests. That puts Edinburgh at about Kp 6.4, a moderate to strong storm, while Inverness, 1.5 degrees farther north, needs about 5.5. The north of Scotland is where small storms pay off; the Central Belt waits for the bigger ones.

Looking across the Forth

The city slopes down to the Firth of Forth, and its northern horizon is the estuary and the coast of Fife beyond it. From the shore west of Leith, at Cramond or around the Forth bridges at South Queensferry, the view north crosses water with the lights of Fife on the far side. East along the coast toward North Berwick, the Forth widens and the far shore recedes, giving a darker northern sky over the sea. The Pentland Hills, just south of the city, give height but look north over Edinburgh's own glow.

Summer light and winter cloud

Edinburgh's summer nights never get fully dark: from May to July the Sun stays within 18 degrees of the horizon, and around midsummer the northern sky keeps a glow all night. The dark season runs from late August, when September's equinox brings its tendency toward geomagnetic storms, to April. Cloud is the constant: the NASA POWER cloud amount stays above 74% in every month. Clear nights often follow the passage of a front, when cold northwesterly air clears the sky for a few hours; the hour strip of the tool, fed here by the MET Norway forecast, shows when that window is expected. The Met Office space weather service publishes UK aurora guidance too. For the rest of the country see the UK page, and for the west the Glasgow page.