A NASA astronaut has shared what the Northern Lights look like when viewed from space and it’s truly a sight to behold.
For obvious reasons whenever the aurora borealis appears overhead we only really get to see the underside of it, what lies above is very hard to see without either a spacecraft to view it from or an unfeasibly long ladder.
Fortunately for astronaut Don Pettit he knows all about spacecraft as he’s currently aboard the International Space Station, having blasted off on 11 September last year for a mission of around six months.
The view from space is really something and many astronauts return to Earth irrevocably changed by being able to look back at the planet we all came from, struck with the realisation that we’re all just clinging to this chunk of rock that’s hurtling through the universe.
Posting on social media, Pettit put some footage on there of the view of an aurora that was blazing across the sky.
While most people would look at it from below, the NASA astronaut shared what it would look like to view the ‘intensely green’ phenomenon from above.
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In fact, if you check his socials he posts all sorts of pictures of what our world and the vastness of space around it looks like from up there on the ISS, along with what Christmas in space is like.
However, this video of an aurora from above has got some people wondering just how they work as a few puzzled commenters said they didn’t realise ‘auroras are that low’ as well as some accusing the footage of being AI-generated.
Time for a science lesson gang, the lowest part of an aurora can be as low as 50 miles high in the sky, and according to NASA green auroras typically occur in a space in the sky between 60 miles and 150 miles off the ground.
Meanwhile, the International Space Station is 254 miles up so it would be above a green aurora and could easily look down on the phenomenon.
Flying over aurora; intensely green. pic.twitter.com/leUufKFnBB
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) January 6, 2025
Red auroras are a bit different, as they occur from 125 miles in the air to almost 250 miles, but once again the ISS would be high enough off the ground to see it from above.
The best place to view auroras is at Earth’s magnetic poles, and auroras in the northern hemisphere are known as ‘aurora borealis’ while in the southern hemisphere they’re called ‘aurora australis’.
They’re caused by activity on the sun’s surface, as solar storms can give off large clouds of electrically charged particles which travel long distances and can eventually hit the Earth.
While most of them are deflected away, some of them get caught by our planet’s magnetic field, which is why auroras are best viewed at either pole.
What we get to see, whether it be from the ground or above in space, is the result of atoms in our atmosphere colliding with these particles which came from the sun and the results are beautiful.
