Aurora tonight in Copenhagen

Can you see the aurora borealis from Copenhagen?

Copenhagen is well outside the normal aurora zone, so a display here requires a genuinely strong geomagnetic storm — which is exactly why the sightings that do happen make the news.

Copenhagen needs Kp 5 — the same threshold as Edinburgh, which surprises people who assume Denmark is too far south. It is a low, flat country with a small land area and very little to block a northern view, so when a G1 storm arrives, the main obstacle is the city's own light rather than anything geographic.

Country

Denmark

Magnetic latitude

55.7°N

Geographic latitude

55.68°

Aurora threshold

Kp 5

Light pollution

Bortle 8

Deep-dark nights / yr

266

Sun at solar midnight

57.8° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Copenhagen aurora season

Work from **10 Aug** to **2 May**: that is the stretch in which Copenhagen gets a properly black sky, 266 nights in all. Outside those dates the sun never drops the full 18° below the horizon, so some twilight stays in the sky whatever the geomagnetic forecast says. The counter-season is just as clearly defined: from about **3 May** to **9 Aug** (99 nights) the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so the sky never reaches full darkness, and between roughly 28 May and 14 Jul it does not get properly dark at all — no display, however strong, is visible in that stretch.

The nights here do get genuinely dark — the sun bottoms out 57.8° below the horizon in midwinter. But for roughly 3 May to 9 Aug it never gets that low, and the sky stays too bright for anything but the strongest displays. The season is therefore defined by dark nights, not by calendar dates.

Where to go in Copenhagen

The Øresund coast north of the city gives you water, a flat horizon and an easy escape from the light dome.

The aurora sits over the magnetic pole, so from Copenhagen 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 Copenhagen?

Here is what each Kp value would actually put in Copenhagen's sky — the row that matters is the one at Kp 5, which is where this city's magnetic latitude of 55.7° places its threshold:

At Bortle class 8, Copenhagen's own light is the biggest single obstacle between the forecast and what you actually see. A Kp 5 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 Copenhagen

Five inputs produce the answer at the top of this page, and every one of them is specific to Copenhagen: the NOAA Kp forecast against a threshold of Kp 5 (35% of the score), cloud cover through the night at 55.68°, 12.57° (25%), the moon (15%), astronomical darkness at this latitude (15%), and light pollution at Bortle 8 (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.