Northern Lights in PennsylvaniaVisible Tonight?
Real-time aurora forecast updated every 15 minutes
Kp 2.0 is well below the Kp 7 that Pennsylvania needs, so the aurora stays too far north tonight.
Verify with the live sky camera →No clear chance in the next 10 nights; forecasts update several times a day, so check back.
Tonight, Hour by Hour
The four things that must line up over Pennsylvania, and how each hour of the night looks.
Kp 2.0 now, Kp 7 needed here
53% cloud cover around 10 PM
Dark from 10 PM
Certified dark sky; moon 8% lit
All times shown in Pennsylvania local time (EDT), not your device time.
10-Night Aurora Outlook
Planning a trip to Pennsylvania? Peak activity, cloud cover, and darkness for the nights ahead.
Kp ~ marks nights beyond NOAA's precise 3-day forecast, estimated from the 27-day outlook. Treat the far nights as a rough guide, not a promise.
Seeing the aurora in Pennsylvania
The northern lights reach Pennsylvania only when a strong geomagnetic storm pushes the aurora far south, and your best shot is the dark sky over the PA Wilds. Cherry Springs State Park, a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park in Potter County, has the darkest and most open northern horizon in the eastern United States. Sitting near 41 to 42 degrees north, naked-eye color here needs a severe storm, so a live verdict beats guessing.
Our verdict is not a Kp number. The Kp index is a global, three-hour average, and treating it as a promise is the single biggest reason people drive out and see nothing. Instead we check four things for Pennsylvania specifically: whether forecast activity reaches the level this latitude needs, whether the sky will be clear, whether it will actually be dark, and how much moonlight and local light pollution will wash out. Only when all four line up do we say yes.
When to go: aurora season in Pennsylvania
Aurora season in Pennsylvania runs from late August through mid April, the same dark-sky window as the rest of the northern United States. The limit is not solar activity but darkness: in June and July the sky never gets fully dark late enough for a low northern-horizon glow to show. The strongest odds cluster around the September and March equinoxes, when Earth's magnetic field couples more efficiently with the solar wind and the same storm produces a bigger display.
Because Pennsylvania sits near 41 to 42 degrees north, aurora here is tied to big storms rather than the steady activity that far-northern states enjoy. During the current solar maximum a handful of severe storms each year have pushed naked-eye color across the state, and those are exactly the nights the 10-night outlook above is built to flag two or three days ahead.
Why Cherry Springs and the PA Wilds are your best bet
Cherry Springs State Park is the best aurora-viewing site in Pennsylvania because it has the darkest sky in the eastern United States. Rated Bortle 2 and certified Gold Tier by DarkSky International, the park sits on a plateau inside the 262,000-acre Susquehannock State Forest with no city glow for miles. When a storm does reach this far south, the faint low aurora that would vanish over Philadelphia or Pittsburgh stays visible here.
The wider PA Wilds region backs it up with Ole Bull State Park, Ricketts Glen, and long stretches of state forest that share the same dark, north-facing horizons. The simple rule is to get north and west of the cities and find an open view toward the northern horizon, since that is where the aurora sits at this latitude. A clear north view over a ridge or field can turn a marginal night into a real one.
How to read tonight's forecast for Pennsylvania
For a naked-eye aurora in Pennsylvania you generally need Kp 7 or higher, and a good overhead show usually waits for a severe Kp 8 to 9 storm. Your camera can catch a faint glow a step earlier, near Kp 6, which is why this forecast keeps a separate camera-only tier. The Kp number is only the entry ticket, though: a clear northern horizon and true darkness matter just as much, so the verdict above folds cloud cover and twilight into one answer.
On a promising night, get out early, give it at least two hours, and let your eyes dark-adapt for 15 minutes without looking at your phone. Aurora arrives in bursts called substorms, quiet stretches broken by 15 to 40 minutes of activity, so patience is the whole game. Point a phone in night mode at the northern horizon now and then, because the camera will pick up an approaching display before your eyes do.