New England skywatchers who caught the northern lights dancing over Worcester, Cape Cod, and even downtown Boston the past two Octobers shouldn't count on a repeat performance this year. The sun has cooled off since its recent peak, and forecasters say the odds of another region-wide auroral spectacle in October 2026 are looking slim.
Solar Cycle 25, the sun's roughly 11-year cycle of rising and falling activity, reached what scientists call solar maximum in late 2024, according to The Boston Globe. That peak produces more sunspots and raises the likelihood of solar flares, which release charged particles called coronal mass ejections that can trigger auroras when they slam into Earth's magnetic field. Since then, activity has declined: more than 200 sunspots were visible at once during the height of the cycle, and the Globe reports there are now fewer than 100.
Two Octobers of Dazzling Displays
The memory of what New England has been missing out on lately is still fresh. A geomagnetic storm on May 10, 2024, driven by a barrage of solar eruptions from sunspot region AR 13664, sent pinks, purples, reds, and greens dancing over the region, with the display visible as far south as the Bahamas and Hawaii, per the Globe's reporting. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Center for Geospace Storms called it the strongest geospace storm since 2003, with the DST index — a measure of geomagnetic disturbance — surpassing -400 nanotesla. That same storm also lit up the skies over Hawaii, the Bahamas, South Africa, and Australia, according to the lab's account.
Auroras returned in October 2024, and then again on October 10, 2025, when the display stretched from Maine to Massachusetts and remained visible even in light-polluted areas around Boston, the Globe reports. That night, people reported pink and green curtains of light over Worcester, Cape Cod, the North Shore, and the city itself. November 2025 brought yet another spectacular show across Massachusetts and New England, the outlet notes, capping off roughly a year and a half of unusually frequent sightings.
Why the Show May Not Go On
The culprit behind this year's dimmer outlook is simple physics: the decline in sunspots translates to a drop in the number of solar flares, which in turn reduces the frequency of coronal mass ejections traveling toward Earth, per the Globe's report. Space.com pins the solar maximum even more precisely, noting it very likely occurred in October 2024, which puts all of 2025 into the declining phase of the cycle — a trend the outlet says will almost certainly continue through 2026. That means fewer sunspots, solar flares, and CMEs than during the cycle's peak.
Still, the same outlet cautions that a quieter sun doesn't mean the door is completely shut. Historically, the strongest solar events tend to happen during a cycle's declining phase, sometimes even years after solar maximum, and strong flares — along with the possibility of another impressive aurora display — remain on the table for next year, space.com reports.
A Window That Isn't Fully Closed
Some of the most impactful geomagnetic storms have occurred one to three years after solar maximum peak, according to the Globe's report — a stretch of time that arguably includes right now. That history leaves open the chance that New England could still see one or two more exceptionally bright aurora nights before the sun settles into a quieter stretch, per the same account.
Even as the big shows become rarer, northern New England could still catch the aurora roughly once a month during solar minimum, though the Globe notes that at that lower intensity, the lights may show up only as a faint northward glow that's really only visible through a camera lens rather than the naked eye. Space.com adds that 2025 already produced the third-strongest geomagnetic storm of the cycle so far, a G4-level event on November 11, following a G5-level storm in May 2024 and a G4-level storm in October 2024 — evidence that dramatic storms can still land even as the overall trend points downward.
Looking Ahead to the Next Cycle
Scientists are already trying to get a read on what comes after Solar Cycle 25 winds down. Early estimates suggest Solar Cycle 26 could be weak to moderate and likely somewhat weaker than the current cycle, per the Globe's reporting, though researchers expect a more confident forecast within a couple of years. A technique described in the dossier's sourcing, tied to identifying a sunspot-count switch-off point when extreme space weather activity abruptly winds down, could eventually let scientists estimate the strength of a coming solar cycle roughly seven years before it peaks.
For now, New England's aurora chasers are left watching a sun that's cooling off from a stretch unlike anything in decades — the May 2024 storm remains a benchmark against which future displays will be measured, even as the region settles back into more ordinary, camera-only glimpses of the lights overhead.
