March 8, 2025 Moonlight Aurora

This Aurora was sparked by a Coronal Hole event with high (800km/s) solar wind speeds. I had been seeing reports of auroras from across the globe that afternoon, and wondered if it would be visible once the sun set. Once twilight set in, I snapped a couple photos, and nothing. There was a fairly strong moon illuminating the landscape and the sky. When I would look towards the northern horizon, I saw phantom glows with my unaided eye that did not register as anything in the camera. Just after 9pm local time (04:00 UTC March 9th) I set up an interval program to automatically take a photo every few minutes. Amazingly, the very first photo in the set showed a pink glow against the moon-blued sky. Then it was gone. Once I saw the pink in the viewfinder, I thought I could make out the lights, but the moon was something bright and very high in the sky making it hard to know for sure. If it had happened in the dark moon time, it would have been really bright. Usually I shoot 15-20 second exposures for nighttime, but with the bright moon, I was limited to 6-8 seconds. The fact that it outshone the moonlight means it must have been a fairly strong burst!