ISS astronaut captures auroras and a meteor in stunning timelapse from space (video)

Auroras, stars and a fleeting meteor are captured in a mesmerizing new video from the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, shared a new timelapse of photos taken of Earth just before sunrise. This nighttime view includes auroras dancing through Earth’s atmosphere, glittering stars, passing satellites and a brief meteor streak.

The timelapse was taken from inside of the Cupola module of the orbiting lab, with the robotic Canadarm2 seen in the foreground of the video. Dominick shared the new time-lapse in a post on X (formally Twitter) on July 21.

Related: Meet the SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts launching to the ISS

“If you watch carefully, part way through you can see a meteor streak towards Earth,” Dominick wrote in the post.

However, most prominent in the timelapse are the green and purple auroras that light up the night sky. Auroras, commonly known as the northern lights or southern lights, are caused by charged particles emitted by the sun, also known as solar wind, that collide with and excite atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere, creating the glowing light shows.

It has been a year of intense auroras due to the solar maximum, which occurs when the sun reaches peak solar activity during its 11-year cycle. As a result, Earth is bombarded by even more solar particles that produce more frequent auroral displays at night.

Dominick launched to the space station on March 3, 2024 and is serving as a flight engineer aboard the orbiting lab for a planned 6-month mission. In addition to his assigned tasks, which include science experiments and maintaining the space station, Dominick has enjoyed taking pictures from the vantage point of space.

In a separate post, Dominick explained how he and his crewmates set up a unique shot of the Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, which carried the Crew-8 astronauts to the space station. The crew set up a camera in Boeing’s Starliner cockpit window looking up at Dragon to capture portrait shots of each crew member. The perfectly timed photo, which Dominick also shared on X (formally Twitter), leverages the moonlight to illuminate Dragon, with stars and part of the Milky Way captured in the background.