It's been a great year for views of Earth at night from space — in part because of the upswing in solar activity, and in part because more observers are taking better advantage of NASA's voluminous image databases.

German filmmaker Michael König has drawn together some of the best time-lapse sequences from the International Space Station, which were captured from orbit between August and October and archived at the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

König says he "refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut" the footage for his compilation. "All in all, I tried to keep the looks of the material as original as possible, avoided adjusting the colors and the like, since in my opinion the original
footage itself already has an almost surreal" look, he says on the Vimeo website.

The results certainly made a splash: It was picked up by Britain's ITN television network, as demonstrated by the video above. The full HD version reveals crackling lightning storms, whirling stars and whizzing satellites in the skies above, and the arc of airglow at the edge of the atmosphere. The stars of the show are the rippling auroral displays, which have been shining in abundance this year due to an increase in geomagnetic storms.

Give König's video a look, and enjoy the spacey soundtrack by Jan Jelinek:

More amazing imagery from orbit:

• See the world from outer space ... in 60 seconds
• Fly over the southern lights on the space station
• Spaceships bask in the glow of the aurora
• Red sky at night, astronaut's delight
• Atlantis' descent witnessed from the space station
• Solar storms spark beautiful blasts over Earth
• India-Pakistan border shines out into space
• Egypt's river of light snakes through the night
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

Tip o' the Log to Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

It's been a great summer for auroral displays, and especially from space. Here's a time-lapse video showing the International Space Station's passage over the southern lights on Sept. 11. The tour begins with the station arcing southeast over eastern Australia, passing over New Zealand and then heading northeast in its inclined orbit. There's a dense cloud cover over Earth's surface, but that just makes the ripples of green light stand out even more.

The 26-second video was compiled from about 16 minutes' worth of photo-snapping by the space station's crew, from their vantage point in the orbiting outpost's Cupola observation deck. (Make sure you're watching the PhotoBlog wide-screen version.)

North or south, auroral lights are sparked when electrically charged ions from the solar wind interact with atoms in the upper atmosphere. In an advisory about the video, NASA notes that green is the most common auroral shade, coming from the light emitted from emitted oxygen atoms. Flashes of red show up here and there. You can also see a golden glow visible along the rim of the atmosphere, just above the curving horizon. That airglow is caused by the excitation of atoms by ultraviolet radiation.

For a big assortment of Earth views from NASA, check out the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, and for auroral views feast your eyes on SpaceWeather.com's Aurora Gallery. Here are a few more must-see examples of our Earth at night, as seen from the International Space Station:

• See the world from outer space ... in 60 seconds
• Atlantis' descent witnessed from the space station
• Solar storms spark beautiful blasts over Earth
• India-Pakistan border shines out into space
• Egypt's river of light snakes through the night
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

This must-see video condenses the International Space Station's night flight over Earth into 60 seconds, courtesy of science educator James Drake. He downloaded a series of 600 pictures from the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth — a voluminous archive of a half-century's worth of imagery from the space station and NASA's manned spacecraft. Then he assembled them into the clip you see here using VirtualDub software.

The flight to the sunrise begins over the Pacific Ocean and zooms at an altitude of about 220 miles (350 kilometers) past Vancouver Island and Victoria, the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, Texas and Mexico, Central and South America. The highlights to watch for include constellations of city lights, lightning flashes in the clouds, the stars whirling in the night sky above, the faint brown-yellow atmospheric airglow that rims the eastern horizon, and the glorious dawn at the end.

For more of Drake's work, check out his Infinity Imagined website.

More amazing imagery from orbit:

• Atlantis' descent witnessed from the space station
• Solar storms spark beautiful blasts over Earth
• India-Pakistan border shines out into space
• Egypt's river of light snakes through the night
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

Tip o' the Log to Fraser Cain at Universe Today.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.