Northern lights tonight in New York

New York sits at about 52° magnetic latitude, so the aurora reaches it from roughly Kp 6.9 — a few nights a year, on G2–G3 storms. The card below reads NOAA's oval, tonight's dark hours, the cloud and the Moon for Tupper Lake, Adirondacks right now.

Upstate New York sits at 51–53° magnetic latitude, better than its geographic 43–45° suggests, so a Kp 7 (G3) storm puts a real arc over the Adirondacks and Kp 7.5 reaches the Finger Lakes. The Adirondack High Peaks are the darkest sky in the north-east; Tupper Lake's observatory site is its public front door. The Lake Ontario shore from Sodus to Oswego gives the flat water horizon due north with Toronto's glow far enough away to sit under the arc rather than in it. New York City itself needs a G4 and even then sees only red on the northern sky.