Aurora tonight in Inverness

Can you see the aurora borealis from Inverness?

Aurora sightings over Inverness are storm events. The city sits well south of the auroral oval, so a display means the geomagnetic field is doing something unusual — and the Kp number required is correspondingly high.

Inverness needs Kp 5 and is the smallest of the Scottish cities in our data, which matters more than it sounds: a smaller light dome means the northern horizon is usable from much closer to town. It also sits at the head of the Moray Firth, which opens north-east toward the sea and gives the aurora a dark, level backdrop.

Country

United Kingdom

Magnetic latitude

57.5°N

Geographic latitude

57.48°

Aurora threshold

Kp 5

Light pollution

Bortle 5

Deep-dark nights / yr

254

Sun at solar midnight

56° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Inverness aurora season

The dates worth planning around at Inverness are **16 Aug** to **26 Apr**. Inside that run the sun clears 18° below the horizon on 254 nights and the sky is dark enough for a faint arc to register; outside it you are relying on twilight and luck. The counter-season is just as clearly defined: from about **27 Apr** to **15 Aug** (111 nights) the sun never gets 18° below the horizon, so the sky never reaches full darkness, and between roughly 19 May and 24 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 56° below the horizon in midwinter. But for roughly 27 Apr to 15 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 Inverness

The Moray Firth shore and the roads running north out of the city both put you under open sky within minutes; the surrounding hills cut off some of the town light entirely.

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

Kp is a planetary number, and the only way to read it usefully is against this city's own threshold. For Inverness that threshold is Kp 5, set by a magnetic latitude of 57.5°:

Two things have to line up for Inverness: the planetary index has to reach about Kp 5, 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 Inverness

Five inputs produce the answer at the top of this page, and every one of them is specific to Inverness: the NOAA Kp forecast against a threshold of Kp 5 (35% of the score), cloud cover through the night at 57.48°, -4.22° (25%), the moon (15%), astronomical darkness at this latitude (15%), and light pollution at Bortle 5 (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.