Aurora tonight in Alta

Can you see the aurora borealis from Alta?

Alta sits close enough to the auroral oval that the northern lights are a routine winter occurrence rather than a special event.

Alta sits at the inland end of its fjord in Finnmark, at magnetic latitude 67.0°N — far enough north that Kp 2 produces a proper display, but set back from the outer coast enough to avoid the worst of the Atlantic weather. Finnmark's interior is noticeably clearer than the coast it drains to.

Country

Norway

Magnetic latitude

67°N

Geographic latitude

69.97°

Aurora threshold

Kp 2

Light pollution

Bortle 3

Deep-dark nights / yr

185

Sun at solar midnight

43.5° below horizon

Midnight sun

71 days

When to look: the Alta aurora season

Counted properly, Alta gets 185 nights of astronomical darkness a year. They begin around **20 Sep** and end about **23 Mar**, and inside that window the sky is dark enough that the only things standing between you and a display are cloud and geomagnetic activity. The counter-season is just as clearly defined: from about **24 Mar** to **19 Sep** (180 nights) the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so the sky never reaches full darkness, and between roughly 8 Apr and 3 Sep it does not get properly dark at all — no display, however strong, is visible in that stretch.

Midnight sun lasts about 71 days at Alta, and for that stretch the engine returns NO no matter how strong the geomagnetic forecast is — a real display can be directly overhead and completely invisible. The compensating midwinter night reaches 43.5° below the horizon. Two ends of one year, and only one of them is usable.

Where to go in Alta

The fjord and the surrounding plateaus both work; the key is getting away from town lighting and facing the open northern horizon over the water or the bare plateau.

The aurora sits over the magnetic pole, so from Alta you are looking toward magnetic north — which in practice means a spot with an open horizon in that direction and no streetlight in front of you. The "best window" in tonight's answer marks the first hour where cloud cover drops below roughly 40% while the sky is properly dark at this latitude.

What Kp do you need in Alta?

The table below converts the abstract Kp index into what it actually means from Alta, using its magnetic latitude of 67° and threshold of Kp 2:

Here the limiting factor is rarely the size of the storm — Kp 2 already delivers at this latitude. What catches people out is substorm timing: activity surges and fades within a three-hour Kp window, so a display can come and go while you are back inside making tea. Look up regularly rather than checking once.

How tonight's answer is calculated for Alta

Five inputs produce the answer at the top of this page, and every one of them is specific to Alta: the NOAA Kp forecast against a threshold of Kp 2 (35% of the score), cloud cover through the night at 69.97°, 23.27° (25%), the moon (15%), astronomical darkness at this latitude (15%), and light pollution at Bortle 3 (10%). The method, its data sources and its known limitations are documented on our methodology page. No signup, no app, no account — the page computes everything in your browser from NOAA and Open-Meteo directly. Anonymous analytics and Google's advertising script are the only third parties involved, and both are set out on our privacy page.