Got a rare chance to photograph an aurora from southern New Jersey last night in the Pine Barrens.
Here you can see the aurora next to the Pleiades and Hyades. Orion is at left.
http://www.astropix.com/Aurora_20150317.HTM
Click on the link to see a larger version with more information.
After it got dark I took a Sky Quality Meter reading and it was weirdly bright at mag 20.03. Usually it is about a half a mag darker
.
The transparency was excellent, so this had me puzzled for a bit, but then I remembered that the KP index had been very high earlier in the day and I immediately thought: aurora!
So I started taking some pictures. Even though it wasn’t really visible to the naked eye, it did show up in the images.
Another weird thing was that it showed up in the west and the east, but not in the north.
Jerry