Apologies up front here to my Canadian friends – I’m sure you see this all the time, and as I babble over a single night of reds and greens, I can only hope this is one of those things that doesn’t ever get old. But when you live south of the Mason-Dixon line, seeing an aurora is noteworthy under any circumstance!

I have to give my wife credit for being able to see the aurora on Veterans’ Day (Nov 11, 2025). She was tracking that a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) had taken place and that we had potential conditions for a geomagnetic storm. The data I found showed that nothing much was happening, we had a 1% chance of seeing anything… and then she went out in the front yard and took a picture showing clear red across the northern sky.

So we drove out to the river where we could see low to the horizon without any obstructions, and by the time we got there we could see reds and greens clearly with the naked eye!

Here’s what Tuesday’s event looked like from Southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake!

First with the Nikon DSLR…

I tried up to six seconds with the Nikon, but it tended to wash everything out in red and obscure a lot of the structure.

And then, night mode with the Samsung Galaxy. Much brighter!

Get Out There