Well before it got dark, the auroral oval indicated the aurora was overhead. On these occasions, the aurora will become visible before darkness envelopes the sky. It took a bit to start seeing it visually and photographs showed it better, but indeed it was there. The first few shots indicated the aurora was well underway. Overall I got the feeling that the bulk of the aurora that I saw was a bit muted, or diminished, compared to brighter aurora I have seen before. The Moon was a bit under 4 days old, still a fairly slender crescent, but it still did add some brightness to the sky, but not as much as the aurora did. These are more commonly known as "blue sky" aurora since the sky is still illuminated when you are able to see them. Unfortunately the sky still needs to be rather diminished before you can see them, otherwise you would have been able to see this aurora 3 hours before sunset, but the sky is still too bright for that. You can see the blue sky in these few images.




You can check out the "SUN" folder and you will find for this and other days leading up to the aurora, the massive group of spots that were able to generate near or X-class flares/CMEs over and over again. The storm let up and I retired for the evening, only to find out that a fantastic display occurred after I got home. That really fries my bacon!

The indicators were R3 - S2 - G5 (Extreme) with a Kp index of 9 (maxed out)

More to come . . .