Aurora Borealis from Space: The View from the ISS

When viewed from the International Space Station — orbiting at approximately 400 km, well above the 100–300 km auroral emission zone — aurora borealis transforms from a vertical curtain into something entirely different: a luminous carpet of shimmering light stretched across the curved horizon of Earth, seen from above looking down.

From the ground, aurora appears to hang vertically like curtains because we look up through the emission layer along the magnetic field lines. From the ISS at 400 km, the astronaut looks down and across the auroral emission region. The aurora appears as a broad, horizontal sheet of light roughly 100–200 km below, curving with Earth's surface toward the horizon. The vertical structure that is so striking from the ground — the rays, the folds, the curtain ripples — becomes a lateral texture of light and shadow rather than upward structures.

During active geomagnetic storms, ISS astronauts have described aurora as a "river of green and red fire" snaking along Earth's surface, a "shimmering emerald carpet," and most memorably, a zone of light that feels close enough to reach. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who photographed aurora extensively during his 2013 ISS stay, described it as "the most beautiful thing I've ever seen from space" — extraordinary praise from someone who had seen Earth from orbit daily for months.

One perspective unique to ISS observers: they can see both aurora borealis and aurora australis simultaneously when the orbit carries them between the two polar ovals. On a single ISS orbit (about 90 minutes), an astronaut can look down at green northern lights over Scandinavia, cross the equator, and then look down at southern lights over the Southern Ocean — witnessing in one pass the twin phenomena that a ground observer can only experience by traveling between hemispheres. This cross-polar view has confirmed the conjugate nature of aurora in ways no ground-based observation can.

The ISS orbits Earth at an inclination of 51.6 degrees — meaning it never passes directly over the poles. This has important consequences for how ISS crew experience aurora.

At its highest latitudes (51.6°N and 51.6°S), the ISS is at the equatorward edge of the typical auroral oval during quiet conditions. During moderate geomagnetic activity (KP 4–5), the oval expands enough for the ISS to pass beneath or through it. During major storms (KP 7+), the expanded oval extends well below 51° latitude and the ISS can find itself directly inside the aurora for extended portions of its orbit.

When the ISS passes beneath the aurora — with the display above and around the spacecraft — the experience for astronauts shifts dramatically. Instead of looking down at a sheet of light, the aurora surrounds the vehicle laterally: green and red light visible through the cupola windows at the same altitude or slightly above, with Earth's dark surface below and stars above. This within-aurora perspective is described as particularly striking, comparable in some accounts to flying through a luminous cloud.

The ISS makes approximately 16 orbits per day, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes. During an active geomagnetic event, crew members can experience multiple aurora passes within a single shift. NASA maintains a public record of ISS aurora photographs; many of the iconic space-based aurora images widely shared online were taken from the ISS's cupola module, a dedicated Earth-observation facility with seven windows providing nearly 360° views.

Time-lapse videos taken from the ISS show aurora in a way impossible from the ground: the entire auroral oval, often spanning hundreds of kilometers, compressed into seconds of footage that reveals the dynamic breathing and pulsing of the oval as Earth rotates beneath the spacecraft. These videos make the global scale of aurora immediately visceral in a way that ground-level scientific descriptions cannot quite convey.

Two NASA satellite missions — POLAR and IMAGE — revolutionized our understanding of aurora by photographing the entire auroral oval from above in ultraviolet light, revealing its structure and dynamics at global scales.

The POLAR satellite (1996–2008) carried the Ultraviolet Imager (UVI), which captured global UV images of the aurora from a highly elliptical polar orbit that took it from 5,000 to 56,000 km altitude. From this vantage, UVI could photograph the entire northern auroral oval in a single frame — showing it as a complete glowing ring around the magnetic north pole. These images confirmed the oval shape predicted by theory and revealed that aurora is not a static curtain but a constantly morphing global structure that brightens, expands, contracts, and develops structures across its entire extent simultaneously.

The IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) satellite (2000–2005) carried the Far Ultraviolet (FUV) imaging system, which took global aurora images with unprecedented temporal resolution. IMAGE could photograph the aurora in the far ultraviolet (121–190 nm range), detecting atomic oxygen and nitrogen emissions invisible to the naked eye but extraordinarily bright at UV wavelengths. The satellite's highly elliptical orbit allowed it to photograph the entire auroral oval from distances of up to 45,000 km, revealing the full geometry of the oval and how it responded to CME impacts on timescales of minutes.

The IMAGE mission's most scientifically significant contribution was photographing conjugate aurora — showing that both the northern and southern auroral ovals activate simultaneously during geomagnetic events, confirming the mirror-image relationship between aurora borealis and aurora australis. IMAGE's FUV cameras photographed both poles simultaneously during the Halloween 2003 geomagnetic storms, producing definitive visual evidence of the magnetospheric symmetry that drives aurora at both ends of Earth's magnetic axis.

Modern operational satellites including NOAA's DMSP constellation and various Defense Department spacecraft continue to image the auroral oval from space, and the data feeds directly into the NOAA Ovation Prime model used in real-time aurora forecasting.

Astronauts who have witnessed aurora from space consistently describe it as among the most visually overwhelming experiences of orbital spaceflight — and they are working from a baseline that already includes sunrises every 90 minutes, the full disk of Earth below, and the permanent starfield of space above.

Ron Garan (NASA), who lived on the ISS during a period of elevated solar activity in 2011, wrote: "The auroras were unbelievable. There are no words to describe the experience of flying through an aurora. The beauty of our planet and the power of the natural forces at work were overwhelming." He photographed aurora from the cupola during multiple geomagnetic events, producing images that were published worldwide.

Sunita Williams (NASA), who has accumulated over 320 days in space across two ISS missions, described aurora as "a green fog that sometimes fills the entire cupola window — it's like flying through a green nebula." She noted that the aurora's motion is visible in real time from space, describing curtains shifting and brightening within the span of a single photography session.

Alexander Gerst (ESA), the German astronaut who commanded the ISS in 2018, posted a widely shared aurora video from space showing the auroral oval as a continuous band of green and red light encircling Earth's arctic regions, with thunderstorm lightning flashing in the tropical atmosphere below. The juxtaposition of two entirely different electromagnetic phenomena — tropospheric lightning and magnetospheric aurora — in a single frame became one of the most celebrated space photography images of the decade.

Beyond the visual impact, astronauts note the scientific intimacy of witnessing aurora from above. Scott Kelly (NASA), who spent 340 consecutive days on the ISS, observed that watching aurora from space makes the normally abstract concept of the magnetosphere tangible: "You can see exactly where the particles are going in, where they're hitting the atmosphere. It stops being a textbook diagram and becomes something physical you can watch happening in real time."

The emotional response astronauts describe to aurora from space is closely related to what psychologists call the overview effect — a cognitive shift in awareness reported by many spacefarers when viewing Earth as a whole. For an exploration of aurora's psychological impact on Earth-bound observers, see our guide on aurora's effect on humans.