NASA’s oldest active astronaut just gave Earth a jaw-dropping look at one of the planet’s rarest and most beautiful phenomena—from over 250 miles above. As reported by Space.com, astronaut Don Pettit captured vivid videos of green auroras dancing across Earth’s atmosphere from the International Space Station (ISS)—and the view is pure cosmic magic.
Celestial Lights Caught in Motion
On April 4 and 5, Don Pettit, who is currently aboard the ISS, posted two short but spectacular videos to X (formerly Twitter), revealing sheets of luminous green auroras rippling across the sky beneath the space station. One video captures the lights as the ISS passes above the icy waters between Australia and Antarctica, while the other shows an ethereal scene Pettit described as “green vaporous turbulence” over an undisclosed region.
Viewed from orbit, the auroras appear like glowing waves of smoke rolling over Earth’s upper atmosphere—an effect caused by solar particles colliding with atoms in our planet’s magnetosphere.
What Are Auroras and How Do They Form?
Auroras—commonly referred to as the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis)—are created when solar wind particles, primarily electrons and protons, interact with Earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. These charged particles follow Earth’s magnetic field lines and enter the atmosphere near the poles, where they collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, exciting those atoms and causing them to emit light.
The green color seen in the videos is characteristic of oxygen atoms at altitudes between 100 and 300 kilometers. When these atoms return to their ground state after being energized, they emit green photons—a visible glow that can spread across thousands of kilometers under the right conditions.
Auroras are more frequent and intense around the time of solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic activity peaks every 11 years. As solar activity increases, so does the frequency of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares, which release bursts of charged particles capable of triggering auroras. The auroral displays captured in this footage likely resulted from one such solar event reaching Earth.
