Aurora Borealis: Northern Lights seen over the UK

Spectacular displays were seen from the north of Scotland to as far south as Jersey.

17:37 28 February 2014

Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, were seen over parts of the UK including north of Scotland, Jersey, Essex, Gloucestershire, Norfolk, and South Wales.

The amazing display was caused by electricity-charged particles from the Sun entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This causes scenes that are simply breathtaking.

Mark Thompson, presenter of the BBC's Stargazing Live, said: "Three or four days ago the Sun will have thrown a lot of this stuff out in an event called a coronal mass ejection, and they would have been travelling towards the Earth since. It all depends how active the Sun has been."

Meanwhile, Lucie Green, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, provided an explanation: "At the moment we are at the height of the Sun's activity cycle, and it's ultimately energy from the Sun that creates the Northern Lights."

"When we were watching the Sun on 25 February we saw that a particularly large and fast eruption leapt off from the Sun's atmosphere, and the models predicted that we would probably get a glancing blow from this eruption, and they were right."