ISS astronaut captures green auroras dancing over city lights (video)

Don Pettit continues to give us great views of Earth from the International Space Station (ISS).

The NASA astronaut trained his camera on the northern lights recently, posting on X (formerly Twitter) a short video of the ghostly phenomenon flickering over nighttime city lights.

“Flying over aurora; intensely green,” Pettit wrote in the Monday (Jan. 5) X post, which didn’t specify which part of the planet was pictured.

Flying over aurora; intensely green. pic.twitter.com/leUufKFnBBJanuary 6, 2025

Pettit, who arrived at the International Space Station in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, is known for his off-Earth photography skills.

Related: NASA astronaut uses homemade star tracker to take incredible deep space photo from ISS

In October, for example, he snapped a long-exposure photo that depicted city lights in northern Mexico as bright, dynamic streaks. That same month, he photographed a sphere of water that looked a lot like Jupiter, a colorful little ersatz world he created on the ISS using food coloring.

In November, Pettit captured the trail SpaceX’s giant Starship megarocket made in Earth’s atmosphere during its sixth-ever test flight. And in December, he posted on X a surprisingly sharp shot of distant stars and galaxies, which he took with the aid of a homemade star tracker.

Then, on Jan. 1, he posted a gorgeous northern lights photo, a very seasonal one featuring red and green aurorae.

photo of earth at night taken from the international space station, showing red and green aurorae

Don Pettit shared this photo of auroral displays from the ISS on Jan. 1, 2025. (Image credit: NASA/Don Pettit)

The current six-month-long ISS mission is the fourth spaceflight for the 69-year-old Pettit, the oldest active member of NASA’s astronaut corps.

He has two other long-duration ISS stays under his belt, one in 2002-2003 and the other in 2011-2012, and also flew a two-week mission to the orbiting lab in 2008.