You don’t often see the world’s dazzling aurora from this angle. NASA astronaut Josh Cassada took a stunning photo of the light show from his seat on the International Space Station (ISS), flying an average of 400 kilometers above Earth.

Cassada wrote “Absolutely untrue” under a photo she shared on Twitter.

Cassada isn’t the only skywatcher to marvel at the aurora borealis today. Light shows caused by the interaction of charged solar particles with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere have recently been enhanced by intense solar activity.

In particular, a “hole” or corona in the Sun’s outer atmosphere has created a stream of solar wind, that is, a stream of charged particles constantly flowing from our star. And huge clouds of solar plasma, ejected into space by coronal mass ejections, hit our planet on both Sunday, February 26 and Monday, February 27, adding even more fuel to the aurora fire. As a result, screens have spread far from their natural home of ultra-high latitudes. (Earth’s magnetic field lines tend to direct charged particles toward our planet’s poles.)

For example, the subtle dancing lights recently stunned observers in the British Isles and even appeared in southern California: they were photographed over Death Valley National Park on Monday (opens in a new tab). Cassada arrived at the ISS last October with three other members of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, NASA’s Nicole Mann, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, and astronaut Anna Kikina.

The quartet will be able to admire our planet from above for up to a week if all goes according to plan: Crew-5 should return to Earth about five days after SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission arrives at the orbiting lab. Crew-6 is currently scheduled to take off early Thursday morning, March 2, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.