Aurora tonight in Paris

Can you see the aurora borealis from Paris?

To see the aurora from Paris 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.

Paris needs Kp 8 — a G4 storm — which in practice means a handful of nights per solar cycle. The city sits far enough south that the aurora only appears during severe geomagnetic storms, and the light pollution here is intense, so sightings tend to be reported from the surrounding countryside by people who went looking deliberately.

Country

France

Magnetic latitude

48.9°N

Geographic latitude

48.86°

Aurora threshold

Kp 8

Light pollution

Bortle 9

Deep-dark nights / yr

328

Sun at solar midnight

64.6° below horizon

Midnight sun

none

When to look: the Paris aurora season

Paris has 328 genuinely dark nights a year, from about **10 Jul** through to about **2 Jun**. That figure comes out of the city's own latitude rather than a regional rule of thumb, which is why it can sit weeks away from a neighbouring city. The counter-season is just as clearly defined: from about **3 Jun** to **9 Jul** (37 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.

The nights here do get genuinely dark — the sun bottoms out 64.6° below the horizon in midwinter. But for roughly 3 Jun to 9 Jul 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 Paris

You need to leave the city and its suburbs entirely; open farmland thirty to sixty minutes out, with the glow of Paris firmly behind you, is the minimum.

One practical rule covers most of it: from Paris the aurora appears in the northern sky, so plan the spot around that view rather than the forecast. The "best window" above is the earliest hour tonight where cloud cover drops below roughly 40% and the sky at this latitude is genuinely dark.

What Kp do you need in Paris?

Kp is a planetary number, and the only way to read it usefully is against this city's own threshold. For Paris that threshold is Kp 8, set by a magnetic latitude of 48.9°:

At Bortle class 9, Paris's own light is the biggest single obstacle between the forecast and what you actually see. A Kp 8 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 Paris

The score above is built from five weighted factors, each using Paris's own figures rather than a regional default: Kp against a local threshold of 8 (35%), cloud cover averaged across the dark hours at 48.86°, 2.35° (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.