Northern Lights: Friends mistake Premier Inn for Aurora Borealis in hilarious video

A hilarious TikTok video shows how two friends mistakenly believed purple light coming from a Premier Inn was the Northern Lights.

Karim Akhtar, 22, and Sully Laurent, 21, were walking home from a night out in Norwich on May 10 when they saw the purple light in the sky. The two friends were impressed thinking they had spotted the aurora borealis, however the light turned out to be coming from a Premier Inn on Duke Street.

The pair visited Iceland in January hoping to see the Northern Lights and joked that they had "missed them again". The friends can be heard saying, “Oh my god… We went all the way to Iceland!” before realising their comical error and asking, “how have we been catfished?”

Premier Inn joked: "There’s no need to search the skies, Premier Inn is a beacon of light and can bring the aurora glow directly to your room, without needing a camera to see it."

The Northern Lights were visible in the UK last weekend (May 10 - May 11) due to a rare solar storm.

Are the Northern Lights out tonight?

While it is likely the Northern Lights won’t be as visible as they were last weekend, aurora forecasters say there’s a “slight chance” of glancing Coronal Mass Ejection (CMEs) impacts on May 17 into May 18 in the Northern Hemisphere.

Forecasters said: "These [CMEs] may bring some limited enhancement to the aurora, with the slight potential of allowing for some visibility as far south as northern Scotland or similar latitudes.”