Aurora tonight in Invercargill

Can you see the aurora australis from Invercargill?

Invercargill looks south into the aurora australis, the southern counterpart of the northern lights, and its behaviour is governed by the same geomagnetic activity that drives displays over the Arctic.

Invercargill needs Kp 6 and is the southernmost city in New Zealand, which in practice makes it the country's best-placed aurora location. There is very little population south of it and nothing at all between it and the Southern Ocean, so the southern horizon is as unobstructed as it gets anywhere inhabited.

Country

New Zealand

Magnetic latitude

-46.4°S

Geographic latitude

46.41°

Aurora threshold

Kp 6

Light pollution

Bortle 4

Deep-dark nights / yr

365

Sun at solar midnight

67° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Invercargill aurora season

The calendar is not the constraint at Invercargill — the sun clears 18° below the horizon on all 365 nights, so the sky is dark enough whatever month you pick. Pick the night with the clearest forecast instead, and expect the southern winter to give you the most hours in which to use it.

There is no bright season to work around at Invercargill. The sun clears 67° below the horizon at midwinter and stays dark enough on every night of the year, so the question is never whether the sky will be dark — only whether it will be clear.

Where to go in Invercargill

The coast south of the city, and the roads out toward Bluff, give you an unbroken southern horizon over open ocean.

Everything you are looking for is in the southern sky over the magnetic pole, so the practical requirement is simple: an unobstructed southern horizon with no artificial light in your line of sight. The "best window" shown above picks the first hour where cloud cover drops under roughly 40% while the sky here is genuinely dark.

What Kp do you need in Invercargill?

Here is what each Kp value would actually put in Invercargill's sky — the row that matters is the one at Kp 6, which is where this city's magnetic latitude of -46.4° places its threshold:

Two things have to line up for Invercargill: the planetary index has to reach about Kp 6, and the local sky has to be clear. Kp is a three-hour planetary average, so a display can start and fade inside one interval, and short substorm bursts routinely outperform the headline number. When the answer above says MAYBE, that usually means the geomagnetic side is fine and cloud is the question.

How tonight's answer is calculated for Invercargill

Five inputs produce the answer at the top of this page, and every one of them is specific to Invercargill: the NOAA Kp forecast against a threshold of Kp 6 (35% of the score), cloud cover through the night at -46.41°, 168.35° (25%), the moon (15%), astronomical darkness at this latitude (15%), and light pollution at Bortle 4 (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.