Mighty Aurora
Mighty Aurora (#C96844) is a true orange with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (16°, 55%, 53%) places it in the balanced band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English mihtig, strong — adjectival suffix -y, sharing root with German mächtig. As a color modifier, mighty implies a saturated-and-strong-presence quality, where the hue commands visual attention through pure pigmentation strength. Sits at the bold-and-saturated end of the grid, parallel to forceful and commanding in tone.
The atmospheric phenomenon of charged particles colliding with the upper atmosphere — particularly the aurora borealis (northern lights) at high latitudes. While auroras span green and violet, the warm-orange variant occurs when particles collide with high-altitude atomic nitrogen. The color refers to an orange auroral curtain: a soft, slightly red orange with the optical translucency of upper-atmosphere emission.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.