“Dancing” aurora captured from orbit: Crew Dragon astronauts show rare footage from space

Crew Dragon astronauts have published impressive footage of an extraordinarily bright aurora captured from Earth orbit. In the video, glowing green and purple ribbons literally twist and “dance” above the planet’s atmosphere, creating a spectacle that is rarely seen even from space.

According to the astronauts, this highly dynamic behavior of the aurora is linked to recent intense solar activity. Shortly before the filming, the Sun produced a powerful flare and a coronal mass ejection — a giant cloud of charged particles. Upon reaching Earth, this stream collided with the planet’s magnetic field and triggered a G4 geomagnetic storm, one of the highest ratings on the space weather scale.

It is during such storms that auroras become especially bright and unpredictable. Normally, their structure changes relatively smoothly, but this time the поток of charged particles was so intense that the light arcs began to change shape rapidly, creating the effect of living motion. From orbit, it looks as if giant glowing waves are rolling along the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA astronaut Anne McClain noted that the aurora not only lit up the atmosphere, but also reflected off the hull of the docked Crew Dragon spacecraft. The footage also shows the movement of satellites against the glowing horizon, making the video even more impressive.

Scientists remind that auroras occur when particles of the solar wind collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Depending on the altitude of the collision, the sky can take on green, red, pink, and purple hues. During strong solar storms, such light shows become visible far beyond the polar regions.

The video quickly gained popularity on social media. Many users admitted that the footage resembles scenes from science-fiction films, although in fact it shows one of the most beautiful and powerful natural phenomena happening right now above our planet.