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Know what you are looking for

Look for a pale arc, low down, lying along the northern horizon. It often looks still at first. Stronger displays develop upright rays that move, and only the biggest storms show colour clearly to the naked eye.

Your phone is the fastest way to confirm it. The one thing that matters is holding the shutter open for a few seconds, so the phone has to be still. A tripod is best, but a wall, a gate or a bag will do to start with. Face north. If there is aurora, it will show green where your eyes saw grey.

How you get a long exposure depends on the phone. Night mode is the easiest if you have it, and it will often choose the length itself once it senses the phone is steady. Pro or Manual mode gives you the shutter speed directly, which is better, and Samsung and many Android phones have it built in. On an iPhone, Night mode appears on its own in the dark and you can drag its slider up to the maximum. Failing all that, a long exposure camera app will do it.

Roughly three to ten seconds, ISO around 1600 to 3200, is a sensible starting point. Our guide has the full settings, including focusing in the dark and what to change when a display is bright.

Go out when it is actually dark

Sunset is not darkness. The sky stays too bright for well over an hour afterwards, and in a UK summer it may never get properly dark at all, particularly in Scotland. Perfect solar activity is worth nothing under a bright sky.

The card at the top of our live page tells you tonight's darkness times for your location. Use those hours, not sunset.

Stand somewhere sensible

Face north. Get away from streetlights and away from any direct light in your eyes, and find a spot with a clear, low view to the north, since that is where a UK aurora sits. A north-facing coast, a hilltop or open countryside all work.

Then give your eyes twenty minutes to adjust, and longer is better still.

Use red light, never white. One glance at a white torch, a car headlight or a bright phone screen undoes that adjustment and you start the twenty minutes again. A head torch with a red mode costs very little and keeps both hands free. Turn your phone brightness right down before you leave the house, and use its night or red screen filter if it has one.

Our viewing locations page lists dark sites around the UK.

Take nothing, at first

You need no equipment to see the aurora. Warm clothes and a phone are genuinely enough for your first few attempts, and standing still outdoors is colder than you expect, even in summer.

When you do buy something, make it a tripod and a red head torch, in that order. A long exposure shows every wobble, and propping a phone on a wall only works if there happens to be a wall pointing the right way. Even a cheap tripod with a phone clamp is the difference between a blurred smear and a photograph worth keeping, and it lets you use longer exposures than you could ever hold by hand.

The equipment page covers clothing, torches and what to carry, and the guide covers proper camera work.

The two numbers worth learning

Hp30 is how disturbed the Earth's magnetic field is right now. Higher means the aurora reaches further south. Around 5 brings it to Scotland, around 6 to northern England, and higher still to most of the UK.

Bz is the direction of the magnetic field arriving from the Sun. When it is negative it links up with Earth's own field and lets energy in, which is what drives a display. Negative is what you want, and the more negative the better.

That is enough to use this site. The solar activity page explains the rest properly when you want it.

Put it on your phone and say yes to notifications

This is the step that actually gets you outside. Most UK displays are brief and happen at awkward hours, so watching the numbers all evening is no way to catch one. Let the site do the watching.

Add it to your home screen. On Android, open this site in Chrome, tap the menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen. On an iPhone, open it in Safari, tap Share and choose Add to Home Screen. You get an icon like any other app, and it opens straight to tonight's conditions.

Then say yes to notifications, and turn them all on. When the phone asks for permission, allow it. If you dismiss that prompt it will not ask again and you will quietly get nothing, which is the most common reason people think the alerts are not working. Then go to settings and pick your level. Start at a lower one, since a quiet week with no alerts tells you nothing about whether they work.

An Android app is on the way as well, and it will do the same job with proper native alerts.