Mega aurora display - 19 January 2026

At last, after months of frustration since a brief showing of a weak display back in April 2025, I had a brief opportunity to capture some more aurora images, to add to my sparse collection. 

Why is it that whenever there is aurora activity, nearly always it either in the early hours, cloudy in southern Oxfordshire or is too weak or short-lived to be of great interest?! 

This time however the activity was strong for two successive nights but even then clouds ruled out any views, apart from a brief window of just over an hour from about 22:15 on the 19th January. It had been raining until just before then, so I was very surprised to find clear skies outside the back door when I popped out again for a quick check! 

So I rapidly setup in the garden to see what was showing. This time I wasn't disappointed and there was a very strong display underway, completely filling the field of view of my 16mm lens on my full frame Canon R5! It was bright enough to clearly showing on live view, which is most unusual. 

I gave it about 20mins here, taking 8 second exposures at 10 second intervals using the camera's internal intervalometer. From these shots I was able to generate a short timelapse video. A still is shown below. 

Aurora as seen from the garden.
Click here to see a timelapse video on YouTube

Keen to get a less obstructed view, I then headed out a short distance to a reasonably dark location at the foot of the downs, that has a good northern horizon. But by the time I got there the aurora had badly weakened and the clouds were making a comeback. Nevertheless I persisted here hoping that I could dig something out of the less than impressive images I was capturing. After about half an hour the cloud cover had returned to almost 100% and it was time to go home. 

Aurora as seen from the foot of the downs.
Click here to see a timelapse video on YouTube

This was the strongest display I have seen since the famous G5 geomagnetic storm on 10 May 2024, which was (for me) most unusually (a) visible from nightfall and (b) un-interrupted by cloud.