YOU may have missed it, but the skies over Oxfordshire were transformed by a celestial display this week.

On Tuesday night the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, illuminated the north of the county.

Amateur astronomer Mary Spicer, from Tackley near Bicester, who also runs the UK Women in Astronomy Network, caught the display in a time-lapse video.

Miss Spicer, 42, said she and fiancé Mark, also an amateur astronomer, spent two hours in a field in Tackley filming the show.

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She said: “It was amazing – you couldn’t see anything with the naked eye because of the mist, but you could capture it with a camera using a 25 second exposure.

“A couple of days ago the sun kicked out a really big solar flare, which sent out this charge of particles causing a geomagnetic storm.”

Miss Spicer uses an app on her phone called the Aurora Notifier which lets her know about major solar activity.

The app measures the so-called KP index, which measures geomagnetic activity in the earth’s atmosphere.

On Tuesday night Miss Spicer said the KP index reached eight, the strongest level the county had seen in about 15 years.

Royal Astronomical Society spokesman Rob Massey said Tuesday’s display was seen as far south as Somerset, and so should have been visible to the naked eye in Oxfordshire, weather permitting.

The celestial show comes ahead of the solar eclipse tomorrow, the most spectacular in this country for 16 years.

In Oxfordshire, the moon will block out 82 per cent of the sun starting at about 8.25am.