Aurora from the UK

The oval on the left-hand rail defaults to Europe because that is the map that includes Shetland, Orkney and Northern Ireland in one glance. Switch to UK or Scandinavia for a tighter crop. These are visualisations, not a live OVATION nowcast.

For a public alert with magnetometer bones, use AuroraWatch UK. For official watches, use the Met Office. Photography does not change Kp.

A G1 watch is mainly Shetland, Orkney, the Outer Hebrides and, with luck, the north coast of Northern Ireland. County Antrim is closer to the oval than Yorkshire. The Chilterns need a proper storm. Scienception will not pretend otherwise. Cloud remains the last-mile antagonist: a perfect magnetogram under a front is still a dark parish.

Not every electric-blue summer sky is an oval. Noctilucent clouds are ice in the mesosphere, lit after midnight in high summer. They do not care about Kp. Caption them separately or you train readers to distrust every night photograph.

SMILE, with a major UCL MSSL role, is being built to photograph the magnetopause that sits upstream of these curtains. The oval is the exhaust. The boundary is the engine. Read the SMILE explainer if you want the cause, not only the colour.

Read: G1 watch for Shetland and NI, why most of England still will not see it, noctilucent clouds over Scotland, the grid currents under the oval.