Aurora Mosaic from the Geomagnetic Storm of November 11-13, 2025

  • Released Thursday, March 26, 2026
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A coronal mass ejection assiciated with an X5.1 solar flare on November 11, 2026 caused a dramatic auroral dispay on November 12. This mosaic of Day/Night Band (DNB) images from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20/JPSS-1 satellite shows a ring of bright auroral light around the North Pole extending south past 50N latitude.

This is an nighttime image of the northern hemisphere showing a bright ring of auroral light against a darker background of city lights and partially moonlit clouds and terrain.

VIIRS/JPSS1 November 12, 2026

This mosaic of VIIRS/JPSS1 Day/Night band is a composite of 24 hours of nighttime data from November 12, 2026. The aurora is brighter than the clouds, which are illuminated by moonlight. City lights map out the continents, with North America in the lower left, Europe and Africa in the lower right.

This is an nighttime image of the northern hemisphere showing a bright ring of auroral light against a darker background of city lights and partially moonlit clouds and terrain.

VIIRS/JPSS1 November 12, 2026

A vertically oriented view of the aurora, rotated to have -90 longitude point down.

Credits

NASA

Datasets used

  • VIIRS Day/night Band (VIIRS/JPSS1 Day/Night Band 6-Min L1B Swath 750 m) [JPSS: VIIRS]

    ID: 1277
    Type: Observed Data Sensor: VIIRS Dates used: 2025-11-12

    Credit: VIIRS Calibration Support Team (VCST). “VIIRS/JPSS1 Day/Night Band 6-Min L1B Swath SDR- 750m.” NASA Level 1 and Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System Distributed Active Archive Center, 2021. doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ102DNB.021. Date Accessed: 2026-03-25

    This dataset can be found at: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/laads-vj102dnb-2.1

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • Natural Earth (Natural Earth)

    ID: 1148

    Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.

    This dataset can be found at: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Thursday, March 26, 2026.
This page was last updated on Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 6:46 PM EDT.