Brad Goldpaint

The International Space Station creates a long-exposure streak in this photo of the auroral glow over Crater Lake, captured by Oregon photographer Brad Goldpaint. Click on the image to see the full-length video, or watch the embedded version below. For more of Goldpaint's work, check out the Goldpaint Photography website.

A surprisingly strong geomagnetic storm swept over our planet this weekend, resulting in a surprisingly strong set of videos showing the northern lights (and the southern lights, too).

A couple of the videos pack in some extra goodies. For example, Oregon photographer Brad Goldpaint's video of the aurora over Crater Lake features a long-exposure streak left behind by the International Space Station as it passed overhead on Saturday morning.

"Like the aurora, the ISS was another great surprise during the night," Goldpaint, who offers a treasure trove of night-sky views on his website, told NBC News in an email. "Usually I pay close attention to events like these, but this night completely threw me off with strong aurora levels and the ISS flyover."

Goldpaint told SpaceWeather.com that he drove out to Crater Lake National Park on Friday night primarily to photograph the Milky Way, not thinking that there'd be any fireworks. "I've waited months for the roads to open and spring storms to pass, so I could spend a solitude night with the stars," he explained. But by around 11 p.m., he was picking up on the signs of a great auroral show in the making.

"With adrenaline pumping, I raced to the edge of the caldera, set up a time-lapse sequence, and watched northern lights dance until sunrise," he wrote. "The moon rose around 2 a.m. and blanketed the surrounding landscape with a faint glow, adding depth and texture to the shot."

Scientists aren't exactly sure what caused the upswing in geomagnetic activity. "Current speculation focuses on a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) — that is, a shock-like transition zone between high- and low-speed solar wind streams," SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips reported.

There's a chance that observers in higher latitudes will see enhanced auroras on Sunday night as well, due to the interaction between a high-speed solar wind stream and Earth's magnetic field. To keep up with the aurora forecast, check in with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center and its automated Ovation prediction page. If you're in the zone, the best time to see the aurora is after midnight. In the meantime, check out these aurora time-lapse videos on Vimeo. For the best viewing experience, turn the settings to full-screen HD:

More auroral glories:

• Storming sun sets the skies aglow
• Northern lights dance with a comet
• Cosmic Log archive on auroras

For still more great time-lapse videos of the May 31-June 1 auroral outburst, check out "Aurora Over Mount Si" from Jim Reitz, and Michael Rector's "Bright Aurora in the Adirondacks."

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Laurent Silvani

The northern lights shine over La Baie in Quebec at 2 a.m. Saturday, in a picture taken by Laurent Silvani. To see more of Silvani's work, check out his Silvani.ca website and his Facebook page.

A slight solar storm ejected from a powerful sunspot sparked northern lights as far south as Colorado on Friday night — and there should be more to come.

The heightened aurora was sparked by a burst of electrically charged particles thrown off from an active spot on the sun known as Region 1748. That region is the one responsible for four powerful X-class flares that blasted out from the sun this week. Region 1748 is just now turning in our direction, and forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center say it has the potential to throw some hefty storms our way.

Storms from the sun have the potential to disrupt satellite communications and power grids, and in extreme cases, the radiation risk could force airlines to reroute their intercontinental flights to lower latitudes. But Joe Kunches, a spokesman for the prediction center, said experts now have much better capabilities at their command to reduce the risks. And so far, he said, the active sun has been throwing "softballs" at us — at least compared with bigger flare-ups like the Halloween storms of 2003 or the Bastille Day storm of 2000.

The most noticeable effects of recent solar disruptions have come in the form of enhanced auroral displays. SpaceWeather.com reports that faint glows were recorded Friday night in Colorado as well as Vermont, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Washington state.

Farther north, the fireworks show was significantly brighter. Astrophotographer Laurent Silvani captured some great images from Quebec's Saguenay region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Quebec City.

"Following a magnetic storm, the aurora borealis was particularly visible in the sky with its waves and colors. A particularly beautiful sight!" he wrote in an email. "Many people from the Saguenay do not know that there are auroras occasionally here. They are surprised to see my pictures every time."

Check out Silvani's website and Facebook page for more.

For additional views of auroral glories — including, yes, some photos of the southern lights as seen from Antarctica —take a spin through SpaceWeather.com's photo gallery. And who knows? You might be able to catch the show yourself over the next couple of nights. Another geomagnetic storm is expected to sweep over Earth's magnetic field on Sunday, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

To find out what can be seen from where, keep an eye on the center's Facebook page as well as its Ovation aurora forecast maps. If you're in the aurora zone, the best time to look is after midnight. The best places are far away from city lights, with clear, crisp skies. Got pictures? Share them with us via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page.

While you're waiting for those dark skies, feast your eyes on these beautiful time-lapse aurora videos, plus our slideshow: 

Slideshow: Lights in the sky

Click through stunning images of the auroral displays created by geomagnetic storms.

Launch slideshow

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights dance with a comet
• Spend a night with the lights — in a minute
• Cosmic Log's aurora archive

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Talk about dancing with the stars: The glow of the northern lights danced through the night sky this week, thanks to a solar storm that swept past Earth over the past few days. Comet PanSTARRS, which is appearing a little bit farther north in western skies every evening, adds some extra sparkle.

The time around the equinox is considered the peak of the aurora season, because this time of year strikes a balance between the dark skies of winter and the more clement temperatures of summer. And although PanSTARRS may not have panned out the way some of the more optimistic skywatchers might have expected, it's still observable in the Northern Hemisphere — particularly if you're watching with binoculars from a vantage point far from city lights, with a clear view to the western horizon.

Sky & Telescope's PanSTARRS page helps you track the comet day by day, and you can always rely on SpaceWeather.com to have the latest, greatest pictures of PanSTARRS as well as the auroral glow.

For example, French photographer Sylvain Dussans managed to capture both phenomena in one glorious picture, taken from Norway's Senja Island.

Here are a couple more videos of the solar storm and the comet, as seen from Earth and space:

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

This closeup from Chad Blakley's video uses a black circle to highlight the comet's location. For more, check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland page on Facebook.

More about the comet and the aurora:

• Double delight in the skies above
• How to get the most out of PanSTARRS
• Cosmic Log archive for auroras and comets

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Pasi Hakala

Comet PanSTARRS twinkles amid the glow of the northern lights over Lempaala in central Finland on March 17.

The skies were lit up with glowing auroral displays as well as the twinkle of Comet PanSTARRS over the weekend, and a few skywatchers could see both celestial phenomena at once. One of those lucky few happened to be Pasi Hakala, an astronomer at the University of Turku's Tuorla Observatory in Finland.

"I was preparing to take some pictures of Comet PanSTARRS (just as a hobby, even if I'm a professional astronomer) with my camera ... as the aurora appeared right next to it," Hakala said in an email. He said this picture was taken with "an old Olympus E-330 plus a legacy, fast Konica 57mm f/1.2 lens" — which just goes to show that you don't need the latest, greatest camera to take a great picture of the night sky.

It's also true that you don't need to be in Finland to get a great view of the aurora. This weekend's geomagnetic storm was so strong and sweeping that the northern lights were seen as far south as Colorado. "We generally only get to see auroras this far south of the Arctic Circle a few times a decade, when the sun is near the peak of its 11-year sunspot cycle," Jimmy Westlake, an astronomy professor at Colorado Mountain College, wrote in a column for the Steamboat Pilot & Today.

Check out Westlake's photo and more views of the northern lights and Comet PanSTARRS below.

Jimmy Westlake

Colorado Mountain College's Jimmy Westlake captured this view of the aurora behind the twin stone monoliths of Rabbit Ears Peak near Steamboat Springs, Colo. The picture was taken early March 17, "during the wee hours of St. Patrick's Day morning," using a Nikon D700 camera with 50mm lens at f/3.8, 30-second exposure at ISO 6400. As for Comet PanSTARRS: "Colorado has had one storm after another" over the past week, Westlake said, but he has seen the comet through holes in the clouds on three different nights. Check out Westlake's comet shot on SpaceWeather.com.

Chris Cook

Photographer Chris Cook and his son watch Comet PanSTARRS from First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Mass., on the evening of March 13. The photograph was taken via remote shutter release, using a Canon 5D and a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L lens. The image served as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for Monday. Even though PanSTARRS has passed its peak brightness, the comet can still be seen by Northern Hemisphere observers after sunset in the western sky.

Submitted by Christoph Malin / FirstPerson

Christoph Malin sent in this picture of Comet PanSTARRS via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page. The comet was seen during the Imaging Expedition of the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, which went to the 10,000-foot-high (3,050-meter-high) Gaislachkogel Mountain in Ötztal, Austria. Check out this Vimeo clip, and look down below for links to more night-sky views submitted via FirstPerson and Twitter,

More photos of the aurora and the comet:

• Dori Sig (a.k.a. Halldor Sigurdsson) captures the aurora over Reyjavik, Iceland
• Irma Eriksson posts a Facebook picture of the aurora over Stockholm, Sweden
• LeRoy Zimmerman shares a view of the aurora over Alaska. More from LeRoy.

More about auroras and comets:

• Solar eruption supercharges auroral displays
• Video: Airplane provides clear look at comet
• Cosmic Log archive for auroras and comets

Tip o' the Log to @dorisig and @imycomic.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

The northern lights shimmer in the skies above Abisko National Park in Sweden on March 3. "In addition to the northern lights, you can also see a massive fireball streak across the sky," photographer Chad Blakley writes. "It was a fantastic night!"

It's prime time for the northern lights, and particularly for the far northern lights.

"I believe I just saw the most amazing aurora display I have ever seen," Chad Blakley, the photographer behind Lights Over Lapland, wrote from Sweden over the weekend. "I would send you more images, but I have to go back outside and take a few more photos first." (You can see the results in the time-lapse video below.)

Places like Sweden and Norway, Iceland and Finland, Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories are prime viewing areas for the northern lights, because that's where the interactions between Earth's poles and the sun's geomagnetic storms are strongest. The fact that the sun's 11-year activity cycle is close to its predicted maximum should be adding to the show, although the storm activity has been mysteriously low so far. 

There's another factor that makes this month favorable for seeing the northern lights: Experts say that March and September, around the time of the year's two equinoxes, are just right for aurora-watching because the skies stay dark for a relatively long time, and yet the weather is relatively mild. December can get pretty chilly up north, and June is the time of the midnight sun — which is not conducive to seeing the aurora's delicate greenish glow.

Darkness is the key to seeing the aurora, whether you're in Abisko National Park in Sweden, or in Albany, N.Y. Stake out a place that's far from city lights with good northern exposure. The thinner and clearer the air, the better — which means you should be up on a mountain rather than down in a valley. The wee hours of the morning are the best time of night for spotting the northern lights.

If you're not in the prime aurora zone, spotting a good display is a matter of good timing, good luck and location, location, location.

Auroral displays are seldom seen much farther south than the northern tier of U.S. states, but every once in a while there's a strong storm that lights up the skies in America's midsection. To find out when a storm is brewing, check in with SpaceWeather.com, the University of Alaska's Aurora Forecast website and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, plus the prediction center's Facebook page and its Ovation aurora forecasting app. The Yukon Territory's Northern Lights Centre provides additional tips for aurora-watchers. You can also follow @Aurora_Alerts, @AuroraMax and @AuroraWatch on Twitter. 

If you live too far south to see the lights with your own eyes, don't despair: You'll find plenty of auroral pictures in SpaceWeather.com's gallery, and Vimeo has lots of videos to show you. Got a great picture of the northern (or southern) lights? Feel free to share it via our FirstPerson photo-upload page. 

More auroral glories:

• A night's worth of aurora in a minute
• Top spots to see the northern lights
• PhotoBlog's northern-lights archive
• Slideshow: Aurora's greatest hits

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

The northern lights vie with a waxing moon over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Monday night.

One look at SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery will tell you that February has been a very good month for auroral displays in northern latitudes, and an upswing in solar activity promises more to come.

One of the hot spots is Sweden's Abisko National Park, which is the favorite hangout for Chad Blakley of Lights Over Lapland. "We have seen powerful auroras in the sky above Abisko for 13 nights in a row, and it looks like there are more to come!" he wrote in an email Tuesday. "Last night I witnessed one of the finest aurora displays I have seen in many months. February 2013 is turning out to be one of the best months for aurora watching I have ever seen!"

You can get a sense of how Blakley's nights have been going by taking a minute to watch Blakley's time-lapse video below. But don't stop there: I'm also including a time-lapse from Helge Mortensen, a photographer based in Tromso, Norway, and from Oli Haukur and the OZZO Photography team in Iceland.

Scandinavia, Alaska and northern Canada are all hot spots for the northern lights this time of year, even though it gets chilly at night. The auroral displays might dip farther south if we get a nice geomagnetic storm coming our way, and the solar weather outlook suggests that could happen. A new sunspot region known as AR 1678 has cropped up, and SpaceWeather.com says this region could give rise to "a significant solar flare."

Check out the usual places for space weather updates, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center as well as the center's Facebook page and its Ovation aurora forecast chart. You'll also want to keep tabs on the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX website — and the Lights Over Lapland Facebook page, where you'll find an awesome image of the aurora glowing beside a moon halo.

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights boosted by 'The Blob'
• PhotoBlog's northern-lights archive
• Slideshow: Aurora's greatest hits

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thomas Kast

The northern lights glow over a snowy Finnish landscape in a photo taken on the night of Jan. 16-17 by Thomas Kast. Watch the time-lapse video on Vimeo.

"The Blob" from the sun has come and gone, sparking nothing more than beautiful views of the northern lights — and there could be more blobs to come.

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reported that a "plasma blob" of electrically charged particles was thrown out from the sun in Earth's direction — but that the outburst, also known as a coronal mass ejection or CME, wouldn't disrupt satellite systems or electrical power grids when it swept past us on Thursday.

The blob did register on the geomagnetic scale, but well below hazardous levels, just as the center predicted. And although there were no flashy light shows reported in America's Lower 48 states, the northern lights were dancing in high-latitude regions. Thomas Kast caught his first aurora of the new year in the skies over Rokua in Finland.

Kast said the vantage point for the picture you see here is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his home — and the temperatures dipped down to 16 below zero Fahrenheit (-27 degrees Celsius). "I spent more than four hours at that spot," Kast said. "It takes time, but it's so rewarding."

If you like the picture above, you'll love the video version that Kast has just posted to his Vimeo gallery. To see more of Kast's photos, check out his Facebook page as well as his posting to SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery.

Göran Strand saw this week's auroral show from the Kall area in the Swedish municipality of Åre, where the temperature was 11 below zero F (-24 degrees C). "When we arrived at the location and stepped out of the car, a moose stepped out of the forest and looked at us, and it looked a bit surprised finding us there in the middle of the night," Strand said in an email.

"It turned out to be a fantastic night with a half moon that lit up the landscape in a lovely way," Strand told SpaceWeather.com." In the background you can the mountain Åreskutan, the biggest ski resort in Sweden."

For more astrophotography from Strand, click on over to his Astrofotografen website and his Facebook page.

Goran Strand

Swedish astrophotographer Goran Strand captured this view of an aurora lighting up the night sky above a moonlit landscape. The constellation Orion, the Pleiades and the planet Jupiter also gleam in the skies above.

Stian Rekdal

The northern lights compete with the city lights of Ålesund, Norway, in a picture taken by Stian Rekdal.

Meanwhile, in Norway, Stian Rekdal lucked into a glittering photograph of natural and artificial lights.

"It was taken from the viewpoint of Fjellstua (literal translation, 'the mountain lodge'), which is approximately 400 feet above the town of Ålesund," Rekdal wrote in an email. "Aurorae are not as common here as farther north. This part of Norway is also prone to cloudy weather, further decreasing the odds of spotting them. So last night was a rare treat."

Check out more of Rekdal's aurora imagery at the 500px photo website, or the Vimeo video portal. As a bonus, you can feast your eyes on Rekdal's Vimeo video below — but be sure to watch it at full-screen and high-resolution. Then click through our slideshow of the greatest hits from the northern (and southern) lights.

Slideshow: Lights in the sky

Click through stunning images of the auroral displays created by geomagnetic storms.

Launch slideshow

The Space Weather Prediction Center says that two more coronal mass ejections are heading toward Earth — but like the earlier plasma blob, these outbursts "are not expected to be very strong." To find out where auroral displays are expected to glow, check NOAA's Ovation chart, the prediction center's website, the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute's aurora indicator or SpaceWeather.com. And if you snap a great picture of the aurora, feel free to share it via the Cosmic Log Facebook page or NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page.

Update for 3 a.m. ET Jan. 21: Aurora photographer Chad Blakley took the stunning still imagery he captured on Jan. 19 and assembled into this must-see time-lapse video on Vimeo. "The solar blob you wrote about last week has made its way to Earth!" he wrote in an email. For more, check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland website and Facebook page.

More auroral glories:

• Top spots to see the northern lights
• Video: Northern lights captured on camera
• Cosmic Log archive on auroras

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

Auroral lights glow in the skies over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Jan. 13.

It might sound scary to hear that a giant blob of solar plasma is heading straight for us, but don't panic: Space weather forecasters say this solar outburst should deliver nothing more than a spectacular show up north.

"We're not going to be in for a big disturbance," said Norm Cohen, senior forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado. "The northern tier of the United States might be able to see aurorae."

The outburst of electrically charged plasma — also known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME — blasted out from the sun on Jan. 13, sparking a radio blackout. It's taken several days for the blob itself to travel the 93 million miles between the sun and here, but forecasters now expect it to sweep over Earth's magnetic field early to midday Thursday.

When strong solar storms interact with the magnetosphere, they can spark satellite outages and disrupt electric power grids. Fortunately, this one shouldn't be that strong. (In geekspeak, let's just say that the maximum Kp is expected to reach no higher than 4. NOAA's space weather scale lays out the effects associated with higher Kp levels. Check out the prediction center's Facebook page for space weather updates.)

The most visible effect should be the northern lights generated by the interaction between the electrically charged solar particles and atoms in Earth's upper atmosphere, as explained on the "Causes of Color" website. This week's geomagnetic flare-up should add to what's already been a great week for auroral displays in northern latitudes.

Chad Blakley, a photographer at Sweden's Abisko National Park, sent in the beauty you see above. "It looks like there may be more powerful auroras in the days ahead," Blakley said in an email. "It is a very good time to be an aurora photographer!"

For more of Blakley's beauties, check out the Lights Over Lapland website or the LOL Facebook page.

Glowing reports are coming in from space as well. Here's a picture captured by the Department of Defense's DMSP F-18 OLS low-light imager on Jan. 13. The green outlines show Ireland and Britain down south, and Iceland and Scandinavia up north. The ghostly wisps crossing the frame are the northern lights. It's conceivable that the bright streaks you see in this satellite picture are the same ones visible in Blakley's pictures.

DOD via Mark Conner / SpaceWeather.com

The northern lights show up as ghostly streaks of white in a satellite picture captured on Jan. 13 by a low-light imager on the Defense Department's DMSP F-18 meteorological satellite.

Are there more solar blasts heading our way? SpaceWeather.com notes that a complex sunspot region known as AR1654 is pointing in our direction and has the potential to send more big blobs of plasma our way. But Cohen said the worries about that particular sunspot have been receding.

"It's been fairly quiet in terms of flare production," he said. "If anything, it's beginning to show signs of decay."

In fact, there's been increasing talk that this year's expected peak of the sun's 11-year activity cycle could be relatively wimpy. Cohen said he didn't want to make that sweeping of a prediction — but he did admit that there hasn't been as much disruption as some people might have feared.

"The activity hasn't been all that impressive yet," he said.

More auroral glories:

• Top spots to see the northern lights
• Video: Northern lights captured on camera
• Cosmic Log archive on auroras

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley

The green glow of the aurora seems to stretch from horizon to horizon in Chad Blakley's photo from Sweden's Abisko National Park.

Tonight is prime time for the Geminid meteor shower, but there's another kind of spectacle that skywatchers are seeing up north: auroral displays in the Christmas colors of green and red.

The green glow you see above was captured on camera last week by Chad Blakley, the photographer behind Lights Over Lapland in Sweden. "It's aurora season in Abisko National Park," he writes. Blakley runs nightly photo tours in the park when the northern lights are active. To see more of his work, visit the Lights Over Lapland website or Facebook page.

National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss has also been getting some amazing auroral views, thanks to a photo assignment that took him to Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory. Theiss rented a car and drove hundreds of miles farther north to the Arctic Circle. He's been using his Twitter account (@MikeTheiss) to share a series of pictures from his Arctic adventure — including an amazing shot that shows a meteor streak shooting through the auroral lights. You can see that picture below.

We're also including a Christmas bonus: Time-lapse videos from Vimeo and YouTube that incorporate Blakley's and Theiss' pictures. If you're able to, watch them full screen with HD resolution.

For more of Theiss' work, check out UltimateChase.com or Douglas Main's story at OurAmazingPlanet. And if you're a fan of the northern lights or meteor showers, you'll want to click through SpaceWeather.com's photo galleries as well.

Tonight's early reports suggest that this year's Geminid display is shaping up as a great show. If you snap a picture of the meteors  — or the northern lights, for that matter — please consider sharing it with us via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page for sky highlights. If I get enough pictures, I'll pass them along on Friday.

Mike Theiss / National Geographic

Mike Theiss' picture from Canada's Yukon Territory features ripples of the northern lights - plus a meteor streak that can be seen on the right side.

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights shine with the moon
• 'Tis the season for the northern lights
• Your guide to the northern lights
• Cosmic Log auroral archive

Today's pictures also provide a different twist on the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which usually features a daily view of Earth from space during the holiday season. Today, we're highlighting views of space from Earth. To catch up on past calendar entries, follow the links below:

• 2012 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• Day 1: A fantastic Chinese fan
• Day 2: Satellite shows a Grander Canyon
• Day 3: Typhoon stirs awe — and alarm
• Day 4: Glittering nighttime view of Riyadh
• Day 5: Night lights shine on 'Black Marble'
• Day 6: Holy sites seen at night
• Day 7: Blue Marble still leaves its mark
• Day 8: Satellites look into a volcano's hell
• Day 9: Jack Frost nipping at Alaska's nose
• Day 10: Cosmonaut looks down on peaks
• Day 11: Earth looms above moonwalker
• Day 12: Skytree casts shadow on Tokyo
• 2011 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• 2010 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• The Atlantic: Hubble Advent Calendar
• Zooniverse Advent Calendar

Jonathan Tucker

Jonathan Tucker's Sept. 30 photo captures the aurora's reflection in the Yukon lake below. For more of Tucker's work, check out Tucker's gallery on 500px.com,

The good news is that the northern lights hit the heights this weekend, with auroral displays visible as far south as Illinois — and the bad news wasn't all that bad. Sure, the glare of the "Harvest Moon" interfered somewhat, but you could argue that the moonlight added some extra shine to the show.

The northern lights are such a subtle phenomenon that they're best seen from the countryside, far from city lights, and that was the case for Jonathan Tucker, who captured the "September Lights" you see above on Sunday night, near Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory.

"I was sitting at home, and when I looked out my window I noticed the northern lights were out," he told SpaceWeather.com, "so I grabbed my camera and went to a close spot that would be away from city lights. The auroras didn't last long, but I got this shot."

Meanwhile, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Lake Superior Photo's Shawn Malone was heading home from work and watching the moon rise when he noticed spikes of greenish light to the south.

"Immediately looked to the north, and the sky was on fire," Malone told SpaceWeather.com. "Light every direction, multiple arcs at the same time overhead and to the south — had a hard time deciding which way to point the camera!"

Another Upper Michigander, Mark Riutta of Defined Visuals, caught what he called a "mild display of aurora activity" over the Portage Canal in Houghton, Mich.

"I wish it was a little better show, but once the almost full moon got higher in the sky, it seemed to diminish the aurora's intensity," Riutta, whose  told me in an email.

Shawn Malone / LakeSuperiorPhoto.com

The sky is aglow during an auroral display over Michigan's Central Upper Peninsula. For more photos from Shawn Malone, check out LakeSuperiorPhoto.com.

Not to worry, Mark: What you saw was a sight that would make folks like me green with envy. Generally speaking, the best time to see an aurora would be around midnight, from a dark location with clear skies. The higher your latitude, the better. But timing is everything: It does no good to go out to an aurora-viewing spot if there's no aurora. You have to get out and look north (or look south, if you're in Australia, New Zealand or Antarctica) when geomagnetic activity is high — as it was on Sunday night.

Even if you missed Sunday's show, there are more auroral extravaganzas to come, thanks in part to the current upswing in the 11-year solar activity cycle. Keep a watch on the Space Weather Prediction Center's website and Facebook page — and for the current word on space weather, as well as pictures from past auroral displays, you can't do any better than SpaceWeather.com. 

More about the aurora season:

• 'Tis the season for the northern lights
• Your guide to the northern lights
• SpaceWeather.com: Aurora gallery
• Space.com: How the northern lights work
• Cosmic Log archive for auroral glories

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, sent via email every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley

The aurora season is off to a glorious start, as evidenced by this picture from Sweden's Abisko National Park, taken by photographer/guide Chad Blakley. For more of Blakley's work, check the Lights Over Lapland website and Facebook page.

Summer isn't even over in the Northern Hemisphere, but the season of the northern lights is clearly getting an early start.

Saturday's autumnal equinox marks the traditional start of the aurora season in Arctic regions, and with solar activity building up to the top end of its 11-year cycle, we can expect more than the usual allotment of glow-in-the-dark skies. For some reason, this last week of summer has been particularly active on the sun.

"Another day, another coronal hole high-speed stream," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports today on its Facebook page. That means there's a higher chance of interaction between the electrically charged particles of the solar wind and our planet's magnetic field. SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips quotes NOAA forecasters as saying that there's a 25 to 30 percent chance of strong polar geomagnetic storms over the next three nights.

If the geomagnetic buffeting gets too strong, that's potentially bad news for electric-grid managers and satellite operators. But a mild elevation in solar activity is a boon for aurora-watchers, and it looks as if we're experiencing the bright side of a solar upswing right now.

Chad Blakley, a photographer and tour guide for Lights Over Lapland at Sweden's Abisko National Park, says the sights have been impressive — and he has the pictures to prove it. 

"Aurora season has been in high gear for nearly a month in Abisko, and it looks as though this year could be something very, very special," he told me in an email. "We are entering the peak of the solar maximum, and if history is any indicator we should see a marked increase in aurora activity. As you can imagine, I am one very happy man."

Ed Stockard sent in a similarly glowing report from Summit Station, a research facility that's 10,530 feet above sea level on the Greenland ice sheet. "The auroras came on fast and furious, moving and dancing across the entire sky," he told SpaceWeather.com. "Aurora season has definitely begun on top of the ice sheet. Bring on the lights!"

Stockard has already been posting some fantastic pictures to his Flickr gallery. In a follow-up email, Stockard told me more about the Summit Station operation, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation:

"There are five of us here for what we call the first phase of winter. This lasts between mid-August and early November. At that time, another crew of five takes over until sometime in February. A third phase completes our winter phase until mid-April, when an inflated summer crew comes in. The summer season is busy at Summit with researchers mainly from the U.S. but also around the world, doing their NSF-funded research. Most science involves atmospheric research and is tied to the deep ice core drilled here in the 1990s. ..." 

Check out these images from Blakley and Stockard, as well as a time-lapse video captured by Helge Mortensen in Tromsø, Norway. You can expect to see a lot more of this in the months to come.

Ed Stockard

The northern lights ripple over Summit Station on the Greenland ice sheet.

Chad Blakley

The auroral display takes on different hues over Sweden's Abisko National Park. The color variations are due to the differences in the composition of the atmosphere at different altitudes. The greenish glow dominates, but the aurora can turn reddish at higher altitudes, as seen here. Check out the Causes of Color website to learn more about auroral colors.

More about the aurora season:

• Your guide to the northern lights
• SpaceWeather.com: Aurora gallery
• Space.com: How the northern lights work
• Cosmic Log archive for auroral glories

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, sent via email every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Brad Goldpaint

Star trails whirl through the skies over California's Mount Shasta in a time-exposure photo by Brad Goldpaint. For more of Goldpaint's work, check out his website.

Time-lapse is one of the hottest trends in photography nowadays, thanks in part to the wider availability of high-end cameras, high-resolution video and high production values. But you need some high-class talent behind the lens as well.

It doesn't hurt that the past year has been a gold mine for the glories of the night sky, especially the northern lights. We've featured quite a few time-lapse videos of the aurora, as seen from Earth and from space, and you can click through a few of our favorites below. The latest stunner to surface comes from Pacific Northwest photographer Brad Goldpaint, whose work we featured just a few days ago.

Goldpaint's three-minute time-lapse, titled "Within Two Worlds," features three years' worth of sky imagery collected from a variety of locales — including Tumalo Falls, the Three Sisters Wilderness, Crater Lake and Sparks Lake in Oregon, as well as the High Sierra, Mono Lake and Mount Shasta in California.

"I discovered my passion for photography shortly after my mother’s passing while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail three years ago," Goldpaint writes. "This time-lapse video is my visual representation of how the night sky and landscapes co-exist within a world of contradictions. I hope this connection between heaven and earth inspires you to discover and create your own opportunities, to reach your rightful place within two worlds."

For more of Goldpaint's perspectives on the two worlds, check out the Goldpaint Photography website, or his Facebook or Google+ page.

But before you do that, click into the video below and turn it up to full-screen resolution.

More time-lapse wonders:

• Cameras roll on Manhattanhenge
• Northern lights spark summer delights
• Auroral fireworks blaze on video
• Northern lights shine through a crack
• Time-lapse view of aurora from space
• The best of NASA's night lights

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.