Well, I took this in suburban London at almost exactly midnight UTC, looking north, and I don't see any swirlies! Unfortunately light pollution is pretty bad here; this was the darkest place I could find near my home. The first picture is a manual 2 second exposure, to try to bring out anything faint. The second was on auto, to confirm there were indeed stars showing, so there wasn't any cloud (it's often hard to distinguish between a clear light polluted sky and an overcast one; they both look like an orange smear).