Plan your northern lights viewing night
A strong space-weather number is not the same thing as a good local viewing window. Check the aurora signal, cloud obstruction, darkness and moon context together.
Open a tool below, or add a city or ZIP to carry your place into the national aurora check.
Optional device location is rounded before lookup and is not sent to analytics.
Open the live aurora tool
Northern Lights Forecast
Combine NOAA OVATION aurora signal, NWS local cloud forecast, darkness and moon context to find the best available viewing window.
U.S. Outdoor Tools
Find another tool for river conditions, fall trips, smoke, gardening or coastal weather.
State northern lights tools
These tools use the same core NOAA and NWS signals but apply state-specific regions, planning thresholds and local viewing context. Their 0–100 Viewing Score is a planning index, not a probability.
Alaska Northern Lights Tonight
Fairbanks and the Interior, Coldfoot, Denali, Talkeetna, Anchorage, Nome and Southeast Alaska. Darkness is explicitly gated during bright-season nights.
Minnesota Northern Lights Tonight
Voyageurs, Ely and the Boundary Waters, Grand Marais and the Gunflint, Bemidji, Duluth and the North Shore, plus southern Minnesota.
North Dakota Northern Lights Tonight
Turtle Mountains, Pembina, Minot, Devils Lake, Theodore Roosevelt country, Bismarck and Fargo with regional viewing thresholds.
Montana Northern Lights Tonight
Glacier, Whitefish and the Flathead, the Hi-Line, Fort Peck, Missoula, Bozeman and Billings with local sky and darkness context.
Maine Northern Lights Tonight
Allagash, Aroostook, Katahdin, Rangeley, Acadia and Downeast, Bangor, and southern Maine with state-specific viewing guidance.
Michigan Northern Lights
Use the original Michigan regional aurora tool for Michigan. It remains separate from the new state engines and has not been replaced.
Kp is context, not a local probability
Kp describes planetary geomagnetic activity. It does not tell you by itself whether your exact location has aurora overhead, clear skies or darkness at the right time.
Clouds can erase a strong signal
The live tools keep NWS cloud information separate from the NOAA space-weather signal so a cloudy location does not receive a falsely confident viewing claim.
Darkness defines the usable window
Aurora may be active while the sky is still too bright. Sunset and darkness timing narrow the period when the signal can actually be observed.
Moonlight changes contrast, not aurora physics
Moon context helps set expectations for visual contrast and photography. It does not strengthen or weaken the underlying geomagnetic event.
Watching from Michigan?
Use Northern Lights Michigan for the regional outlook and viewing locations. For an autumn trip, explore the Michigan fall color and northern lights planner.