Photographers posted pictures of the colourful lights last night in areas including Southland, Twizel and Tasman.
Te Whatu Stardome astronomer Josh Aoraki said aurora were often able to be recorded by cameras even when they could not be seen with the naked eye.
"We're currently in a pretty high activity period with our sun, and the aurora is a direct result of solar activity interacting with the Earth's magnetic field," he said.
"We've seen a lot of really large prominences in flares off the sun in the last few days and weeks, and that's what's causing those aurora.
"The further south you are in places like Twizel, Southland and Otago, they usually get much better views than up in Auckland."
Areas with less light pollution were the best spots to see the aurora, Aoraki said.
"Places in the middle of the South Island like Twizel, Tekapo which is a dark sky reserve - those places get really good views.
"The darker the sky is, as with anything in the night sky, it's always better to have a darker sky than a light polluted sky."
Aurora were notoriously hard to predict in terms of how bright they would be, but there were ways people could keep an eye out for them, he said.
"The easiest way is to check the space weather. There's pretty constant streams of forecast for the aurora so if you look at NOOA's website, they've got satellites that are kind of constantly monitoring the sun and those can kind of predict if we're going to be hit by aurora potentially."
