Aurora reference
The geomagnetic latitude map
Maps put the aurora in a neat band across the top of the world. It is not neat, and it is not centred on the North Pole — it is centred on the magnetic pole, roughly 800 km away, which tilts the whole thing.
Live · Kp 2 right now
The bright zone is where the aurora reaches at this moment, on the night side only. The faint bands underneath are what each place is worth on an ordinary night.
Drag to spin · arrow keys work too
- Most clear nightsKp 1–2
- OftenKp 3–4
- Active nightsKp 5–6
- Storms onlyKp 7+
Follow any coloured line. It stays at one geomagnetic latitude — identical aurora odds the whole way round — while wandering 12° of ordinary latitude, more than 1,200 km, depending only on which meridian you are standing on.
How to read it
The grey rings are what an atlas shows you: circles centred on the North Pole. The coloured lines are what the aurora answers to, and they are visibly off-centre — pushed toward Europe on one side and away from Siberia on the other.
That offset is the whole reason a Scandinavian city sees the northern lights on a quiet night while a Russian city at the same distance from the pole waits for a storm. Nothing about the sky differs. Their angle from the magnetic axis does.
Both ends of the planet
There are two ovals, not one, and they are mirror images. Tilt the globe downward — or press the down arrow — to bring the southern one into view. Hobart, Dunedin, Christchurch and Ushuaia all sit under it.
Why the American side sits lower
The magnetic pole leans toward North America, so the contours dip furthest south over Canada and the northern United States. That is why the aurora is sometimes reported from Michigan or Maine at a Kp that would show nothing at the same latitude in central Asia — and why headlines about the lights reaching unusually far south are almost always written from the American sector.
Your own coordinates
The map shows the shape. The calculator gives you the number for any point on Earth.
Contours are traced from an eccentric dipole fitted to the IGRF-13 coefficients, epoch 2020. The real field has structure a dipole cannot capture, so treat the lines as a close guide rather than a boundary.