Solar storm heading for Earth – northern lights possible over Ireland on the night into Sunday 25 October

In Malin Head, it may appear as a greenish glow or red pillars low in the sky towards the north.

In Dublin and Galway, it is most likely that only a phone camera in night mode will catch it. The camera gathers light for several seconds and sees colours the eye cannot.

Kp is a global three-hour average. The northern lights come in waves, and an outburst can last ten minutes or two hours, so patience pays off.

Dublin, Galway and Cork look set for partly cloudy skies – a few gaps in the cloud can be enough. Thick cloud is expected over Malin Head for most of the night, so the chances there are slim. Cloud cover is Skycastor's forecast for the dark hours. It is updated continuously, so check again closer to the time.

Find a dark spot with an open view to the north. Street lights and the glow of towns swallow the faint colours, and just twenty minutes out of town makes a big difference.

It is dark enough from about 19:25 until 05:53.

Good dark places include Mayo Dark Sky Park, Kerry Dark Sky Reserve and Malin Head.

Give your eyes 15–20 minutes to adjust to the dark, and avoid looking at your phone screen in the meantime.

Try your phone's night mode, or a camera on a tripod with a 5–15 second exposure. The picture often shows stronger colours than the eye can see.

Auroras form when electrically charged particles from the Sun hit Earth's magnetic field and are channelled down into the atmosphere around the poles. At 100–300 kilometres up, they collide with oxygen and nitrogen, which light up – oxygen in green and red, nitrogen in blue and violet.

That is not a geomagnetic storm on NOAA's scale, but it is enough to push the aurora some way towards lower latitudes.

The Kp index runs from 0 to 9 and shows how disturbed Earth's magnetic field is. At Kp 3, the northern lights are usually seen only in northern Norway, Lapland and Iceland. From Kp 5 they can reach Denmark, Scotland and northern Germany, and at Kp 8–9 they have been seen as far south as southern Europe.