Met Office confirms Northern Lights will be visible from England tonight

Save money on a trip to Iceland and just head outside instead tonight, because the Met Office has confirmed that you could be in with a chance of spotting the Northern Lights.

That's Iceland the country, by the way.

You'd have a much slimmer chance of seeing the renowned Aurora Borealis if you were just glaring up at the florescent lights of a supermarket.

Some Brits might have already been lucky enough to see the colourful phenomenon this weekend, when the conditions were right to send the dazzling spectacle streaming across the sky.

Or, as the Met Office put it, 'a coronal hole high speed stream arrived [...] combined with a rather fast coronal mass ejection leading to Aurora sightings across the UK'.

So basically what I said in the first place.

Many stargazers took to social media to share snaps of the impressive lights, with Twitter users showing them on display in Hertfordshire, Somerset, Liverpool and various places in Scotland.

@metoffice/Twitter

If you got too distracted by Tommy Fury and Jake Paul going head to head last night to step outside and take a look up at the sky, then you'll be glad to know you've still got time as the Met Office has confirmed that they'll be visible again today (27 February).

In a post on Twitter, the weather service wrote: "Did you see the Northern Lights last night? Share any photos you took using #LoveUKWeather to be in with a chance of featuring later. There's another chance to see the #Aurora tonight."

To give yourself the best chance of spotting the Northern Lights, the Met Office has advised finding a dark location with no light pollution and positioning yourself so you're looking towards the northern horizon. So don't forget your compass.

Ideally there'll be no clouds blocking your view, and a tripod and a long exposure length will help you snap some of the best pictures of the sight.

@metoffice/Twitter

Tonight's lights are the result of 'another coronal mass ejection', the Met Office explains, which is the large expulsion of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona.

When these energised particles hit our atmosphere, it creates the aurora.

Billy Teets, the director of Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, explained to Space.com: "These particles are deflected towards the poles of Earth by our planet's magnetic field and interact with our atmosphere, depositing energy and causing the atmosphere to fluoresce.

"Every type of atom or molecule, whether it's atomic hydrogen or a molecule like carbon dioxide, absorbs and radiates its own unique set of colors [...[ Some of the dominant colors seen in aurorae are red, a hue produced by the nitrogen molecules, and green, which is produced by oxygen molecules."

Try to see this phenomenon in action for yourself tonight!