During the past few days, there's been all this hoopla about some weather condition that is making the Northern Lights visible much further south than usual. But it wasn't until last night, when I started seeing people in my area - and in my town - posting pictures, that made me go outside to take a look.
At first, it just looks dark out. But if you get away from house and street lights, you can see a bit of a reddish or purplish tone to the dark. And as others said, you just have to let your camera take care of it. My phone camera went into night mode, and did like a 5 second exposure, and this is what I got
That's the top of my house at the bottom of the 1st picture. I'm not sure how accurate the 2nd one was, but it only looked like that when I faced north. Now all I see on my Facebook feed is everyone's pictures of the Northern Lights.