Aurora in Virginia!

Rare Light Show

Sitting in my living room on the evening of October 10th I began receiving numerous notifications about dramatic auroral activity. Normally, I ignore these alerts because the chance of seeing an aurora at my southeastern Virginia latitude of 37.4 degrees is very low. This time, however, an unusually big geomagnetic storm was predicted, so, just to check, I peeked outside at the northern horizon where I saw a dim red glow unlike the usual glow from light pollution. Next, I grabbed my phone and took a quick 2-second handheld exposure to check the aurora possibility. To my surprise I saw lots of red and even some green! So I rushed inside to tripod mount my Nikon Z6II. Nikon images quickly confirmed that an actual aurora was ongoing! Here's one of the first pictures I took at 10:31 pm EDT.

You can see hints of green on the right. The green faded quickly, however. I should have gone outside 30 minutes earlier. I suspect the green color was more intense then. You can see red becoming stronger relative to green in the next image taken one minute after the previous one.

Soon red became the dominant color covering most of the northeastern sky.

The light show steadily diminished. By 10:54 pm EDT the familiar curtain shape often seen in auroras appeared. 

Finally, by 11:34 pm EDT, most of the display had faded away. Only a dim red pillar was visible in the northeast running through the constellation Taurus.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center produced the following forecast map for this October evening. 

Auroras over Canada were a sure thing according to this map, but not such a sure thing in Virginia. Auroras are very rare in Virginia. I've seen dramatic auroras in Iceland and Norway, but I've seen only one other aurora in Virginia since moving here 47 years ago. So it was a special thrill to see this limited light show from my backyard!