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.

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.

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

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.

Colorful videos prove that the astronauts on the International Space Station had the best seats in the house during last month's flare-up of auroral activity.

NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth is offering a whole new batch of time-lapse videos from the Jan. 25-30 period, when an active region on the sun was blasting out a healthy dose of electrically charged particles and lighting up Earth's upper atmosphere.

These latest videos are notable because they're assembled from still pictures that were taken at a rate of one frame per second, rather than the usual frame every three seconds. As a result, the pace of the videos is more leisurely and a somewhat closer match to the true speed of the space station.

The video above documents a minute of flight heading east from the Pacific over the Canadian West Coast, heading toward southern Alberta near Calgary. I love watching the ripples and flashes of the green aurora over Canada — seasoned with a dash of red from the atomic oxygen that exists at higher altitudes. Why is there red as well as green in the aurora? We've addressed that question before, but this Aurora FAQ from the University of Alaska provides a quick explanation.

Here are a couple more videos, tracking the space station's flight over the U.S. East Coast as well as central North America. But you don't have to stop here. Visit NASA's Gateway, which offers still photos from the space station in addition to the videos, and check out the YouTube channel for NASA Crew Earth Observations. My favorite places for space imagery also include the Fragile Oasis Facebook page, NASA astronaut Ron Garan's Google+ page and Jason Major's Lights in the Dark blog.

If auroras, atmospheric phenomena and solar activity are your thing, you can't do much better than SpaceWeather.com, which is keeping track of lovely aurora pictures like this one from Chad Blakley at Abisko National Park in Sweden. Be sure to check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland website while you're at it.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

Photographer Chad Blakley captured this view of the northern lights over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Feb. 6. "The lights started around 6:00 p.m. and continued into the very early hours of the morning," Blakley told SpaceWeather.com. Check out Blakley's gallery on SpaceWeather.com for still more stunning views.

AuroraMAX / CSA

The rippling northern lights share the skies with a nearly full moon over Yellowknife in Canada's Northern Territories early today, as seen by the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX wide-angle camera. To keep on top of northern Canada's aurora extravaganza, check the AuroraMAX website and Twitpic account.

Update for 3:25 p.m. ET Feb. 8: I originally wrote that the pace of the latest videos from the space station was nearly a true match to the station's orbital speed, but after double-checking with the folks at Johnson Space Center, I'd say it's more accurate to call them a "truer" match than usual. The videos were assembled from still photographs that were captured by a digital camera at the rate of one frame per second, rather than the usual frame every three seconds. That makes for a slower-paced video, but not a real-time speed, because the Web video plays at a rate that's more than one frame per second.

M ore auroral glories:

• Planet looks back at northern lights
• Auroras spark awe across the north
• Northern lights go way, way south
• Speed through Lapland's lights
• Beautiful blasts from solar storms
• Get a video view of Canada's aurora
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive