Whether it's worth heading out for the northern lights tonight — NOAA's space-weather model, the hours of real darkness and the season, in plain words.
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The sky doesn’t get dark enough to see aurora right now.
Around Whitehorse the sky only gets dark enough for aurora from roughly mid-August to mid-April. From May through July the nights never fully darken, so there is little to see even when the sun is active.
| Night | Dark hours | Expected Kp | Sky |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu 30 Jul | No dark window | — | — |
| Fri 31 Jul | No dark window | — | — |
| Sat 1 Aug | No dark window | — | — |
Whitehorse sits at about 61 degrees north, close under the auroral oval — the ring where the northern lights are usually brightest. On a clear, dark night the aurora can appear even when space weather is quiet, which is part of why the Yukon is one of the easier places in the world to catch it.
The same deep-winter darkness that makes late January hard is what makes the aurora possible. Pair this with the daylight tool: as the sun-hours shrink, the hours dark enough for the lights grow.
Updated 29 July at 14:22. The aurora is famously unpredictable. This blends NOAA’s space-weather model with the cloud forecast and the hours of darkness — it can point you to a promising night, but it can’t promise a show. Official forecast: swpc.noaa.gov. Space weather: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (public domain). Cloud & daylight: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0).