Aurora over Mid Wales ! 7th October 2015

6.47pm looking west

Aurora alerts were coming in at 6.30pm on Twitter tonight for KP6 – 7 storm level activity with naked eye aurora potentially visible in Wales and even further south. I headed out for a good wide view to the north at 6.45pm and was immediately greeted with naked eye visible aurora across the whole northern sky from west to north east. I could perceive colour for the first time tonight where I had only seen faint white wisps of light before with green and magenta being clearly discerned. We had amazing bands of green at fairly high altitude for our latitude and then tall pillars of whiter light projected upwards into the darker star filled sky. The show seemed to peak early for our location and was largely over by 7.30pm, but continued to be amazingly intense further north in England and particularly in Scotland.

6.57pm looking north west

6.59pm looking north

7.06 pm looking north

7.07pm looking north

Here’s how that geomagnetic storm developed on the Planetary K index graph from NOAA in the US. It has to hit KP7 for aurora to be visible in Wales and you can see it hitting that between 7 – 9am on the 7th October.