The past year has been filled with some amazing opportunities to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). This is largely because the sun has been very active, meaning there were an above-average number of days where the Northern Lights were visible, and they were visible much further south than normal.

While millions of people have been able to enjoy checking off seeing this incredible natural wonder from their bucket list, very few had the view that NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick recently shared.

He was on SpaceX’s Endeavour Crew Dragon spacecraft during a recent Aurora event and was able to record it from space. He shared the video that he made on X, where he said:

“Red and green aurora appear to dance in a timelapse as we flyby looking out Dragon Endeavour’s window with Dragon Freedom in view.”

He went on to explain the process he went through to capture and create this amazing video:

“We shot a couple thousand images yesterday trying to get the settings, lighting, and framing just right across multiple orbital nights because the aurora was amazing due to recent solar activity. Posted a single frame yesterday from a series of 300 or so images taken at an interval of about 1.6 seconds. Post flight I think I want to render 4k/8k with maybe some exposure smoothing or other processing to smooth out the video between frames. “

Check out the post!

Red and green aurora appear to dance in a timelapse as we flyby looking out Dragon Endeavour’s window with Dragon Freedom in view.

We shot a couple thousand images yesterday trying to get the settings, lighting, and framing just right across multiple orbital nights because the… pic.twitter.com/Y3IhlqTNrO

— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) October 8, 2024

Looking down at the Earth and seeing the Northern Lights was undoubtedly an unforgettable experience.

Even being able to see it through the video is incredible.

I might just be adding ‘see the Northern Lights from space’ to my updated bucket list now, even if it seems unlikely.

What an incredible view!

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.