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Cornwall Aurora & Night Sky Alerts, Hayle (2026)

19/02/2026

I’m excited to share a new resource I’ve been working on — Aurora Forecast UK:

🔗 Link in comments 👍🏼 do have a look!

This site gives a simple, up-to-date snapshot of conditions that might favour aurora visibility in the UK, including Cornwall. It’s designed to be:

Easy to use

Free

Focused on relevant indicators like geomagnetic activity and likely visibility zones

I built this because most aurora forecast tools are global and sometimes hard to interpret for people in the UK. This one is tailored so you don’t have to dig through pages of data just to see if conditions might become interesting locally.

08/02/2026

🌌 Milky Way Photography Workshop – Cornwall 🌌
📅 Friday 12 June 2026

Join me for a relaxed, hands-on night shoot under some of Cornwall’s darker skies, focused on photographing the Milky Way core with guidance throughout the evening.

📍 Location: Dark-sky location not too far from Helston, West Cornwall

🍺 Pre-shoot meet-up:
We’ll meet at a local pub near Helston at around 8:00pm for an informal get-together before heading out. This is a chance to meet, go over the plan for the night, check gear, ask questions, and have food or a drink if you wish (optional).

🌌 Milky Way shooting: from around 11:00pm (after nautical twilight)
✨ Peak conditions: around 1:00am

We’ll work with organised torches-on and torches-off periods so everyone has time to set up compositions, then shoot uninterrupted for 10–15 minutes at a time. I’ll be on hand throughout to help with camera settings, composition, and technique.

I’ll stay on site until around 2:30am to shoot a timelapse, but you’re free to leave at any point once you’ve got what you need.

👥 Small group (max 6 participants)
👫 Each participant may bring one partner or friend
📸 Suitable for cameras with a fast wide-angle lens or capable smartphones

Guests are very welcome but will be expected to follow the same safety guidance and torch etiquette as participants.

After booking, everyone will receive a checklist and PDF guide based on the equipment they’re bringing, so you arrive prepared and confident.

💷 £95 total cost
💳 £40 deposit to book, balance due closer to the event
☁️ Full refund if weather conditions aren’t suitable

👉 Booking link in the comments

05/02/2026

💫 Comet Lemmon over Godrevy Lighthouse 🌌

This image was taken on a clear night on the north Cornish coast, with Comet Lemmon sitting perfectly above Godrevy Lighthouse — one of those sessions where timing, sky conditions and composition all aligned.

The photograph is a stack of 20 × 5-second exposures, which allowed me to bring out fine structure in the comet’s ion tail while keeping the foreground clean and natural.

Because comets move independently of the background stars, stacking can be more challenging than standard night-sky images. For this shot I used comet stacking mode, which aligns on the comet itself rather than the stars. Without this, the comet would blur or fade during stacking as it drifts relative to the star field.

Capture details:

Camera: Nikon D500

Lens: Sigma 85mm f/1.4 Art

Aperture: f/1.4

Exposures: 20 × 5 seconds

Tripod-mounted

Comet-aligned stacking

Processed for improved signal-to-noise and natural colour balance

Short exposures were key — long enough to collect light, but brief enough to avoid motion blur in the comet’s core and tail.

📸 Tips for photographing comets

📐 Use the 500 Rule (as a starting point)
A simple guide to avoid star trailing on a fixed tripod is the 500 rule:

500 ÷ focal length = maximum exposure (seconds)

At 85mm, this gives roughly 5–6 seconds, which is exactly why I settled on 5-second exposures here.
Bear in mind this is a guideline, not a guarantee — high-resolution sensors, crop cameras and comet motion often mean you’ll need to be more conservative.

🔭 Plan carefully

Check timing, altitude and direction — comets are often low.

A clear horizon matters more than perfect darkness.

Watch the Moon phase; moonlight can quickly overwhelm faint tails.

🌍 Choose your location

Coastal viewpoints and elevated ground work well.

Be mindful of sea haze and thin cloud, which can soften detail.

📷 Shooting technique

Fast lenses (f/1.4–f/2.8) help enormously.

Keep exposures short and take lots of frames.

Stack using comet mode if available.

🖥️ Processing

Align on the comet, not the stars.

Keep processing subtle — comet structure is delicate.

Comets are unpredictable and fleeting, but with a bit of planning they’re very achievable from Cornwall — often far more visible through a camera than to the naked eye.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

04/02/2026

🔗 Instagram link in the comments

📸 We’re now on Instagram

A quick update to say that Cornwall Aurora & Night Sky Alerts now has an Instagram page.

The aim is the same as here on Facebook — sharing night-sky updates relevant to Cornwall — but with a slightly stronger focus on images, including occasional astrophotography and visual highlights from around the county.

Nothing changes here:
Facebook will remain the main place for detailed posts, forecasts, and context.
Instagram is simply an extra space for visual updates and shorter posts.

Thanks, as always, for the continued support — and for keeping expectations realistic when the clouds inevitably roll in.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

04/02/2026

🌌 Aurora update – this evening

There are signs that a CME linked to the recent X-class flare has now reached Earth. It’s not on the scale of the last major event, but it does have some strength behind it and is worth noting from a space-weather point of view.

If conditions hold, high-latitude regions (especially further north, nearer the Arctic) may see some auroral activity after nightfall. How impressive that turns out to be will depend on how the solar wind and magnetic field behave over the next few hours.

For Cornwall, however, the situation is unfortunately much simpler: ☁️ Cloud cover is widespread and persistent, which means the chances of seeing anything from the ground here are extremely low. Even if activity does briefly improve, the sky conditions alone are likely to rule it out.
On top of that, the Moon is still fairly bright, which would make any faint activity harder to detect even under clearer skies.

I’ll continue to keep an eye on how things develop, but for Cornwall specifically, this is one to watch on the data rather than chase outside.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

03/02/2026

🌌 Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

This image of the Andromeda Galaxy was taken from my back garden in Cornwall using a DSLR camera and a 180 mm telephoto lens — a good reminder of just how much can be captured without specialist telescopes under the right conditions.

Andromeda (Messier 31) is the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, located around 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. Spanning more than 220,000 light-years, it contains hundreds of billions of stars, prominent dust lanes, and bright star-forming regions. Also visible in the image are its two small companion galaxies, M32 and M110, appearing as faint, elliptical glows nearby.

The image is the result of a stack of approximately 180 individual exposures, each 30 seconds long, all taken over the course of a single night. To make this possible, I used a star tracker, which slowly moves the camera during the night to counter the Earth’s rotation and keep the camera aligned with the galaxy, allowing longer exposures without star trailing.

The stacking process was carried out using specialist astrophotography software DeepSkyStacker and PixInsight, reducing noise and revealing fine detail in the galaxy’s core, dust lanes, and spiral structure.

Final editing was completed in Lightroom and Photoshop, where the colour balance was refined and the galaxy’s core, dust lanes, and spiral structure were carefully enhanced while keeping the surrounding star field natural.

This image also serves as a reminder that you don’t need a large telescope to photograph deep-sky objects. With a DSLR, a good telephoto lens, a simple tracking mount, and thoughtful processing, it’s possible to capture remarkably detailed views of galaxies well beyond our own.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

03/02/2026

🌞 Solar activity update – putting the last 48 hours into context

You may have seen a lot of excitement on social media over the last couple of days about strong solar activity, including X-class solar flares. The Sun has been very active — but it’s important to put that activity into context, especially when it comes to aurora chances here in Cornwall.

📸 About the image
The image attached was captured yesterday around midday from Argentina (UTC −3) using an H-alpha solar telescope. It shows the full solar disk during a period of intense activity.

The large dark region is sunspot AR 4366, currently one of the most active regions on the Sun.
Over the 24 hours leading up to this image, AR 4366 produced:

• 23 M-class flares
• 4 X-class flares, including a powerful X8 flare

You can also see multiple prominences around the solar limb and filaments across the disk, all signs of strong magnetic instability.

Photographers website https://www.eduardoschaberger.ar/

⚠️ Important context
Solar flares on their own do not cause aurora.
What matters is whether this activity produces a coronal mass ejection (CME) that is:

• Earth-directed
• Fast enough
• Magnetically favourable
🔭 Current outlook • No confirmed major Earth-directed CME
• Geomagnetic conditions expected to remain quiet to low
• A possible glancing CME influence around 5 February, likely minor (G1, small chance of G2)

Because AR 4366 is now more Earth-facing, the background risk is slightly elevated, and further flares are possible. However, a major direct impact is not what forecasters are signalling right now.

🌌 What this means for Cornwall • Aurora chances remain low for now
• Any activity would likely be low on the far northern horizon
• Best detected from very dark locations, ideally on moonless nights
• Often camera-only rather than obvious to the eye
For now, this is fascinating solar weather, but nothing worth chasing from the ground just yet. As always, things can change quickly — I’ll post an update if the outlook improves.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

02/02/2026

🌌 Cornwall Night Sky Outlook – February 2026

We’ve already covered the Snow Moon in a post a few days ago, so this is what’s relevant for Cornwall for the rest of February.

We’re now past the Full Moon, and evening skies will slowly start to darken over the coming days.

Key dates for Cornwall:

9 Feb – Last Quarter Moon (evenings get noticeably darker)

17 Feb – New Moon → best dark-sky conditions of the month

The period from mid-February onwards is the best window for:

• General stargazing
• Astrophotography
• Faint objects and star fields
(weather and cloud cover permitting, as always)

⭐ What’s actually worth looking at from Cornwall

February is classic winter sky season:

• Orion is prominent in the southern sky during the evening
• Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is low but very bright
• The Pleiades and wider winter star patterns are still well placed

These are reliable, easy targets and don’t require perfect conditions.

🪐 Planets

Jupiter is the standout planet for Cornwall this month — bright, steady, and well placed after sunset.

Mercury and Venus appear very low in the western twilight later in the month. These are challenging, low-altitude targets and not especially exciting unless you enjoy planet spotting.

🌌 Aurora outlook (Cornwall)

Nothing notable on the long-range outlook at present.
Aurora forecasting is difficult at the best of times, and cloud cover is likely to be the limiting factor this month. I’ll post updates if conditions improve.

🌍 Elsewhere (not visible from Cornwall)

An annular solar eclipse occurs **on **Tuesday, 17 February 2026. The partial eclipse phase begins at approximately 09:56 UTC, reaches its peak (maximum eclipse) around 12:12 UTC, and ends by about 14:27 UTC.

This eclipse forms a thin “ring of fire” only along its path over remote parts of Antarctica — it will not be visible from the UK, and observing it requires special eye protection.

🔭 Bottom line for Cornwall:
February isn’t about dramatic events — it’s about long winter nights, classic star fields, and a good dark-sky window around mid-month if the weather plays ball.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌌

02/02/2026

🌕 Snow Moon over Godrevy Lighthouse (Composite).

I headed over to St Ives to photograph the Snow Moon rising behind Godrevy Lighthouse, with a very specific shot in mind. As is often the case with moonrise photography, conditions didn’t quite play ball.

At moonrise the light was brighter than expected and there was a noticeable amount of haze in the atmosphere, which softened contrast and made it impossible to capture the exact alignment I’d planned in a single frame.

I completely understand that composites aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I’d much rather have captured this shot naturally in-camera on the night. That’s always the goal. However, I didn’t want to simply discard the images I did manage to capture, so I chose to use them to create the final photograph you see here as a composite.

This involved carefully editing and repositioning the Moon so it sat directly behind the lighthouse during post-processing, then cropping and upscaling the image to refine the final result. The intent wasn’t to exaggerate or misrepresent the scene, but to realise the composition I’d planned once conditions made it unachievable in a single exposure.

It’s important to note that the Moon’s size is 100% accurate. I was around 4 miles from the lighthouse, using a 500mm lens on a Nikon D780. At that distance, focal length compression naturally makes the Moon appear much larger relative to the foreground — an optical effect created by distance and lens choice, not by enlarging the Moon artificially.

The second image (posted in the comments) shows the individual frames used to build the composite, so you can see exactly what was captured on the night.

Moon photography doesn’t always go to plan — especially with haze, brightness and timing all working against you — but careful planning and thoughtful post-processing can still bring a creative idea to life when the conditions fall short.

Nevow glan — clear skies 🌙

01/02/2026

🌌 Aurora outlook for Cornwall (1 Feb – 7 Feb)

Overall, this week looks very quiet for aurora activity from Cornwall.

Aurora forecasting is not easy at the best of times, but at present there are no strong signals suggesting anything significant for our latitude. Geomagnetic activity is expected to remain low throughout the week, and combined with persistent cloud cover on many nights, the chances of seeing anything from the ground are very small.

There are no standout nights in the coming week. None of the forecasts show activity reaching levels normally required for aurora visibility this far south.

🌕 Moon conditions:
The Moon is still bright early this week, which would make any faint aurora harder to see or photograph even if activity were to increase.

Taking everything into account — low geomagnetic activity, cloud cover, and moonlight — I don’t expect anything worth chasing in Cornwall this coming week.

As always, aurora forecasts can change quickly. If conditions improve or something unexpected develops, I’ll post an update.

Nevow glan — clear skies.

Cornwall Aurora & Night Sky Alerts

19/02/2026

08/02/2026

05/02/2026

04/02/2026

04/02/2026

03/02/2026

03/02/2026

02/02/2026

02/02/2026

01/02/2026

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