Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Aurora over Europe! We're currently experiencing a strong geomagnetic storm, which caused a stunning auroral display all over Europe the night of January 19. This time-lapse was captured by our colleague Stefan Ströbele over our headquarters in Garching near Munich.

By pure chance, Stefan observed the Sun a few days earlier, on January 16, with a custom-made telescope: youtu.be/Rn7CQ_IUa4k The active regions seen in that video close to the edge of the Sun's disc rotated towards us. A so-called coronal mass ejection coming from this region has caused the ongoing geomagnetic storm.

Credit: S. Ströbele/ESO