Northern lights tonight in New York
New York sits at about 53° magnetic latitude, so the aurora reaches it from roughly Kp 6.4 — 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 53–55° magnetic latitude, better than its geographic 43–45° suggests, so a Kp 6.5 (G2–G3) storm puts a real arc over the Adirondacks and Kp 7 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.
The oval now, pole to 40°, New York's meridian at the bottom. Dashed: tonight's forecast Kp.
Reading NOAA…
Tupper Lake, Adirondacks
rows: dark · oval · clear · no Moon — the window is the run of green hours
Reading NOAA…
Where to go in New York
Three sites a photographer would drive to, each with its measured ground darkness from the light pollution atlas and its own verdict for tonight. Coordinates are approximate: a viewpoint, a shore, a car park.
- Tupper Lake, Adirondacksreading the atlas…—Verdict at this site →
- Sodus Point, Lake Ontarioreading the atlas…—Verdict at this site →
- Thousand Islands, Claytonreading the atlas…—Verdict at this site →
Kp now and the three nights ahead
Camera settings for this aurora
From the oval's brightness right now and the exposure law.
Bright, moving aurora smears at anything over about 4 s: open the aperture or raise ISO rather than lengthen the shutter.
Plan the sequence · stack the night when you are back · the photography guide →
Other places
Sources
Aurora grid, Kp, solar wind and alerts: NOAA SWPC, read live by your browser. Cloud: MET Norway (CC BY 4.0), which receives the site's coordinates rounded to two decimals. Ground darkness: this site's atlas. Magnetic latitude from the 2025 IGRF dipole; the Kp threshold from NOAA's viewing table.