Wow! Between 7 and 8 p.m. EST tonight (0000-0100 UT Oct. 31) we had a very
fine aurora borealis which I viewed just north of Athens, near Danielsville
(34 N) at a dark-sky site where I regularly observe.

As I was driving to the site I wondered what was reflecting on my windshield
to make a dull red vertical streak. I parked, got out of the car, and the
streak was in the sky! It went from the horizon through Perseus to about 40
or 50 degrees altitude.

Unfortunately it faded as I was setting up the camera to photograph it. But
a succession of other auroral activity followed, ranging from northeast to
north-northwest, with both red and green glows, changing on a timescale of
minutes (or tens of seconds), and moving around in such a way that they
could not possibly be clouds. (That, and with binoculars, I was able to see
stars through them.)

Despite the crescent moon, we had mag. 5.5 skies, with the Milky Way plainly
visible. The aurora achieved as much as 5 to 10 times the brightness of the
Milky Way.

I took a lot of photographs which will be developed next week. In general,
horizontal parts of the aurora were greenish, and vertical streamers were
reddish, but that was not the universal pattern.

By 8 p.m. the show was almost over. A shapeless glow, low in the north,
persisted. It resembled the vague aurora we saw late the previous night.
In fact it looked like light pollution except that there is no town in that
direction.

In the past I had only ever seen two auroras: a bright but compact one seen
while flying over Newfoundland and a very vague aurora over Georgia that
looked like light pollution but photographed as brilliant red. (And a vague
glow in the north last night.) This was far more than I ever expected to
see from the Deep South!

Clear skies,

Michael Covington -- www.covingtoninnovations.com
Author, Astrophotography for the Amateur
and (new) How to Use a Computerized Telescope