Residers as far south as Alabama and New Mexico spotted dramatic swirls of red, green and grandiloquent on Wednesday. The brilliant light show, caused by charged patches from a recent solar eruption arriving on the earth, set the horizon ablaze.

National Weather Service offices in states including New York, Oklahoma, Washington, Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho and South Dakota shared northern lights photo of the radiant sky on social media.

The show first appeared on the night sky late Tuesday, after the sun belched giant clouds of charged particles in a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. Those particles, with their own magnetic field, hit the Earth and caused disruptions in the planet’s magnetic field, according to meteorologist Mr Chenard. That in turn set off a geomagnetic storm and caused the mesmerizing aurora, which spread across a wide swathe of the United States.

Mr Chenard said he expected the places with the best visibility to be Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and southern Michigan. The further south the aurora sightings 2025, the more likely residents in the Mid-Atlantic and Tennessee Valley would be able to see it too, he added. Clear conditions were also forecast in parts of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado and elsewhere in the southern U.S. — though the West Coast and Northeast were left in the dark due to cloud cover.

Aurora borealis USA, or northern lights, tends to appear near to the North Pole. But when solar exertion is strong enough, as it was this week, it can be visible as far south as the lower 48 countries. The colors that appear in the sky are determined by the gases that the solar storm aurora interact with — oxygen glows green or red, nitrogen shows blue and purple, and so on.

Wednesday’s aurora was a dazzling reminder of the power of the natural world.