November 11, 2025 11:30 PM | Gloucester, MA

A Historic Aurora Storm Over Gloucester and Essex, Massachusetts

I don’t have enough words to describe 11/11/25. I thought the aurora was incredible, then I’d look again and it was even better. This time my area was one of the only places in New England to not have cloud cover so I went to the Essex/Gloucester area. Picking a favorite to share is very unfair. It did get even brighter than this, but I love the foreground and the visible lines rather than just a solid color.

About That Night’s Aurora

The night of November 11, 2025 was driven by a severe G4 geomagnetic storm, one of the strongest of the current solar cycle, triggered by a series of powerful coronal mass ejections that reached Earth in close succession. Storms rated G4 are considered “severe” on NOAA’s five-level geomagnetic storm scale, and this one pushed the aurora borealis unusually far south, with visible displays reported as far away as Alabama and northern California. On the East Coast, the show carried over multiple nights, which is why the activity went strong into the following evening.

Gloucester, at the northern tip of Cape Ann, has a rocky, north-facing coastline with a wide open horizon over the water and Essex not far behind it, contributing tidal marsh and creek country of its own. That kind of clear sightline matters enormously during a strong storm, since even minor cloud cover or a light-polluted horizon can hide pillars and color that would otherwise be visible to the naked eye. With most of New England socked in by clouds that night, this stretch of coastline turned out to be one of the few clear windows for catching the storm at its peak.