Watch the impressive Northern Lights video from the ISS

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The allure of the space is hard to describe. It’s hardly surprising that billionaires have spent fortunes spending a few minutes in space and even a civilian crew is now flying on missions. But we guess the old adage is true, the best things in life are indeed free. Like this beautiful time-lapse video of the southern lights captured during a routine mission aboard the ISS.

Less popular than its northern counterpart, sighting of Aurora Australis or the Aurora Australis is limited by sighting sites in the southern hemisphere. While Antarctica is largely uninhabited, astronomers find solace in observing them from sites in Australia and New Zealand.

The cause of the phenomenon remains the same in the southern hemisphere as well. According to a recent study by Nature, geomagnetic storms over the Sun release Alfven waves that accelerate electrons back to Earth. The electric field of the waves continues to accelerate electrons like “a surfer catching a wave” and creates the lights that were filmed by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Currently on his second visit aboard the ISS, Pesquet had the chance to spot auroras. Just a day before that time lapse, he grabbed a tri-color one and shared it on Twitter.

On his Flickr account, Pesquet explained that the red color of the aurora was seen at higher altitudes while blue was the effect on the Sun that was on the horizon.

The French astronaut was showered with aurora on this trip. In 2016, when Pesquet was on the ISS for six months, he could only handle one sighting during the entire trip. “I don’t know why we saw so many in the space of a few days when I barely saw one during my entire first mission, but these last ones came with something more,“, he wrote on his Instagram account.

I guess these are things in life that Branson and Bezos’ money could never buy, like these sites.



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