Southern lights by NASA's IMAGE satellite

From space, the aurora is a crown of light that circles each of Earth’s poles. The IMAGE satellite captured this view of the aurora australis (southern lights) on 11 September 2005, four days after a record-setting solar flare sent plasma – an ionised gas of protons and electrons – flying towards Earth. The ring of light that the solar storm generated over Antarctica glows green in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, shown in this image. The IMAGE observations of the aurora are overlaid onto NASA’s satellite-based Blue Marble image. From Earth’s surface, the ring would appear as a curtain of light shimmering across the night sky.

IMAGE hosted an ultraviolet camera that took images and videos of the auroras. ESA's Smile mission will image the aurora in ultraviolet light continuously for up to 40 hours at a time.