A New Zealand astronomer says those who witnessed an aurora during the largest geomagnetic storm since 2017 should count themselves as "very lucky".
Meanwhile, Kiwis who missed out could be in for another speculator show tonight.
From across the South Island, people captured the moment Aurora Australis lit up the skies with green and red before sunrise on Monday.
Director of Otago Museum and astronomer Dr Ian Griffin, who witnessed the moment, told Newshub it was the most powerful storm in about seven years.
"I woke up at home at about 4am and I just looked out the window," he explained. "From where I live on the Otago Peninsula, you don't normally see auroras."
"I quickly got dressed, chucked all my stuff in the car and drove over to a place called Hooper Inlet, which is a really lovely place to see the aurora. I parked the car, set up the cameras and I could see above, the mount of the hills that surround the inland."
"There was a lovely backlit glow, which is the the lovely green aurora. I started taking pictures despite the clouds, because you could see colour between the clouds, and it was really quite beautiful."
He said the colours "slowly faded" as the sky turned blue.
Griffin told Newshub it was the most powerful geomagnetic storm since September 2017.
"At the moment we're heading towards a period called Solar Maximum, which is the maximum peak of the sun's activity which happens every 11 years," he said.
"When the sun gets to its maximum, we get to see a lot more auroras."
"The reason we saw it this morning was because there was an explosion, called a coronal mass ejection, on the sun two days ago which threw a whole bunch of solar material into the atmosphere of the Earth," he explained.
He said the "extremely hot material", consisting of protons, electrons and ions, caused the atmosphere to glow.
"You've got charged particles from the sun that are hitting the Earth's atmosphere and what they're doing is bumping into atoms in our atmosphere, making the atoms excited.
"When they get excited, they start to glow," he said.
"The green colour comes from oxygen, and then the red colour and the purple colour tend to come from nitrogen, so the different gases glow different."
He said the magnetic field of the sun and Earth lines up during March and September.
"The geomagnetic storm is something to do with the relationship between the Earth and the sun, and how the magnetic fields interact."
Griffin admitted he was amazed how clear the colors were despite a full moon and cloud coverage.
"It was really a fascinating thing to watch because it started off with the moon, the bright full moon up in the sky," he explained.
"Normally, the moonlight washes out the aurora. So, it shows how powerful the storm was that we could all see it despite all the clouds," he said.
He said if the sky clears up across the South Island tonight, there's a "good chance" people could see more auroras.
"People could also see something over the next couple of days because, after a storm like this, the earth's environment is still a bit wobbly and a bit uncertain."
He advises those in the South Island should "wrap up" and "get away from the city lights".
"Get yourself a really good view, and fingers crossed you'll see something great."
