While there are travel agencies with packages designed only for certain times of the year in which from the most extreme places in the northern hemisphere you can, with luck, see aurora borealis, this weekend in latitudes so far south with Spain have been observed with some ease. In the Community of Madrid, the lucky ones who witnessed this unusual event were located in remote corners of the capital.
At midnight and from points near the Sierra del Guadarrama, such as the port of Navacerrada or Colmenar Viejo, is where they have been best observed, since it is conditio sine quan non to be in a dark place with clear skies to see them. In many cases they were only visible through the cell phone camera, especially in night mode or long exposure photographs, as explained by some users in X.
This capricious phenomenon requires very specific conditions to see the sky in a dance of colors that you never quite know how long it will last. The State Meteorological Agency (AMET) in response to the avalanche of photos and questions has explained in a thread on the social network X how this rarity has occurred.
The sun is at a maximum of activity that is cyclical, occurring approximately every decade, which causes a large geomagnetic storm in the troposphere (between 90 km and 150 km altitude) and as explained by the AEMET: “Auroras appear because of the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.”
how have auroras been seen in Madrid?
The extreme activity of the sun has been qualified by the National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. This is an unusual and historic event. So much so that the oval in which the photons of light with different wavelengths that make up the auroras are emitted expand until they reach the peninsula.
This exceptionality reached its peak last Saturday and lasted until the early hours of Monday morning. Websites such as SpaceWeatherLive publish forecasts of aurorae occurring in different latitudes, and they already announced that this could happen (and also that it does not seem to happen again). But even with the most approximate sun data it is difficult to predict whether all the ideal conditions will be in place to see them even in the places where it is most common.