Aurora tonight in Amsterdam

Can you see the aurora borealis from Amsterdam?

To see the aurora from Amsterdam you need a serious geomagnetic storm: the city is far enough from the oval that ordinary activity never reaches it, and the nights when it does are memorable precisely because they are rare.

Amsterdam needs Kp 7, the same as London and Berlin. The Netherlands is flat, densely populated and has no dark corners to speak of, so a display here means driving until the light dome is behind you — and then trusting the cloud to cooperate over a country that rarely gets fully clear winter skies.

Country

Netherlands

Magnetic latitude

52.4°N

Geographic latitude

52.37°

Aurora threshold

Kp 7

Light pollution

Bortle 9

Deep-dark nights / yr

290

Sun at solar midnight

61.1° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Amsterdam aurora season

Counted properly, Amsterdam gets 290 nights of astronomical darkness a year. They begin around **29 Jul** and end about **14 May**, 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 **15 May** to **28 Jul** (75 nights) the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so the sky never reaches full darkness, though the sky stays dark enough in the early hours that a bright display is still worth looking for.

On the darkest night of the year the sun sinks to 61.1° below the horizon at Amsterdam — deep enough that the sky itself stops being the limiting factor. From roughly 15 May to 28 Jul the nights never reach full astronomical darkness, so the practical season is shorter than the calendar suggests.

Where to go in Amsterdam

The coast and the IJsselmeer shore north of the city give you a low horizon over water; the polder country further north is darker still.

Face north. Auroral light comes from the oval that rings the magnetic pole, and from Amsterdam that ring lies to the north — so a rooftop, a treeline or a bright shopfront on that side costs you the display no matter how good the forecast is. As for timing, the "best window" figure near the top is the first hour where cloud sits below about 40% during this latitude's darkness.

What Kp do you need in Amsterdam?

The table below converts the abstract Kp index into what it actually means from Amsterdam, using its magnetic latitude of 52.4° and threshold of Kp 7:

At Bortle class 9, Amsterdam's own light is the biggest single obstacle between the forecast and what you actually see. A Kp 7 night that shows beautifully from open country shows as nothing from a lit street. When the verdict above is GO or MAYBE, budget the drive out of town into the evening.

How tonight's answer is calculated for Amsterdam

The score above is built from five weighted factors, each using Amsterdam's own figures rather than a regional default: Kp against a local threshold of 7 (35%), cloud cover averaged across the dark hours at 52.37°, 4.90° (25%), moon illumination (15%), this latitude's astronomical darkness window (15%) and Bortle 9 light pollution (10%). The scoring method, its inputs and its failure modes are written up in full on our methodology page. No account, no app, no email address — everything above is computed in your browser from NOAA and Open-Meteo data. Anonymous analytics and Google's advertising script are the only third parties involved, both explained on the privacy page.