Nature

The Northern Lights show in Northern and Central Italy

The Aurora is one of nature's great phenomena and is quite rare in our latitudes. This year is already the second time it has happened so intensively

by Leopoldo Benacchio

12 November 2025

Lago di Garda, fotografia di Emma Pezzi (12 novembre 2025)

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Here we go again! On the night of 12-13 November, especially in northern Italy, but possibly also in the centre, we may see an Aurora Borealis, or some related phenomenon, filling the sky with colour.

A first caveat: social networks are beginning to show many very beautiful pictures of Tuesday 11 November, but in the USA; here the phenomenon is less intense, then it must be said that a camera accumulates light, while our eye 'downloads' the image to the brain every tenth of a second, and therefore with the eyes we see less than in photos. However, there is a good point, the Aurora is one of nature's great phenomena and at our latitudes it is quite rare. This year's is already the second time it has happened in such an intense way, so: look at the sky, there is no particular direction; go to a dim area, even behind the house; no trips are necessary, just don't stand under a street lamp.

L’aurora boreale nei cieli italiani
Photogallery18 foto

It all started on Tuesday 11 November, when two powerful flares appeared in sequence on the Sun, of class X, 5.1 the degree, in less professional words a crazy explosion of very hot gas in the plasma state, which started at 1,500 kilometres per second from the Sun's surface, one after the other. They are called coronal mass ejections of the Sun.

It's a lot of stuff, as young people say today, it can create problems for the outermost satellites, for planes in flight, but there is no need to worry, while electricity and tlc networks are now designed to take into account even these extreme phenomena. In the past, however, there have been problems with power distribution, in Canada for example.

But why do these Auroras happen?

The Sun, in these cases, emits a lot of energy and also swarms of electrically charged particles that, after a long journey, 150 million kilometres, which they make in a couple of days, arrive at the height of the Earth.

At that point they encounter the atmosphere, luckily the earth's magnetic field acts as a shield, literally, and deflects them towards the earth's Poles, where, however, he himself, the magnetic field, has a sort of flexure, a hole if we want to be trivial, and some particles can enter but only in the upper layers. That is why these beautiful coloured phenomena generally remain confined to Lapland, Iceland, Canada and so on. From what we have said, however, it should not be difficult to understand that if the solar phenomenon is very powerful and energetic, like the one we are observing, then the particles also descend further down in latitude; during the night they were seen in Italy far to the north, around the province of Bergamo, Lake Garda and so on.

Tonight nothing forbids us to hope, until tomorrow morning in fact, that we will be able to see the beautiful, elusive high clouds of various colours: green or red if the solar particles collide with oxygen molecules, blue or violet if the molecule hit is nitrogen.

The price to pay for the spectacle is perhaps that it is a little cold, at least in the north, but to stare at the stars, to be 'ad sidera' the Latins used to say, one sometimes gets cold.