Smile’s first ultraviolet footage shows an auroral substorm. Credit: ESA & CAS/Smile/UVI

The northern lights do not disappear when morning comes. We simply can’t see them because of all the light.

Sunlight overwhelms their faint glow, hiding auroras on Earth’s daytime side from ordinary cameras and human eyes. But a new spacecraft has now watched these lights flicker and surge around the North Pole in ultraviolet from space, revealing a nearly complete ring of auroral activity stretching from night into broad daylight.

The footage comes from the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Beyond the lovely footage, by repeatedly watching the entire auroral oval, scientists hope to follow how disturbances from the Sun move through Earth’s magnetic environment and eventually produce the space weather that can disrupt satellites and other technology.

When the Sun Is Up

SMILE recorded the newly released sequence on July 24, 2026, only about two weeks after scientists switched on its Ultraviolet Imager (UVI). The spacecraft was still being tested at the time.

The footage shows an auroral “substorm,” a relatively brief disturbance in Earth’s magnetosphere, according to ESA.

Image captured on Aug. 2, 2026, by the UVI instrument on SMILE. Credit: ESA & CAS/Smile/UVI

Auroras begin much farther from Earth than the glowing lights we see in the sky. The Sun continuously blows charged particles outward in the solar wind. Earth’s magnetic field deflects most of them, but disturbances can rearrange magnetic field lines and send bursts of energetic particles toward the polar atmosphere. There, the particles collide with gases and make them glow.

This process happens on both the dark and sunlit sides of the planet.

SMILE gets around the daylight problem by observing ultraviolet wavelengths rather than ordinary visible light. Its camera filters out much of the ultraviolet “dayglow” produced by Earth’s upper atmosphere, allowing the aurora underneath to stand out.

The result is an eerie view of Earth surrounded by a shifting luminous ring, including auroras that a person standing beneath the daytime sky could never see.

Potential Space-Weather Map

Spacecraft have photographed auroral ovals in ultraviolet before. NASA’s Polar spacecraft, launched in 1996, collected hundreds of thousands of global ultraviolet images of Earth and its auroras.

But SMILE is the first spacecraft since 2008 capable of imaging the full northern auroral oval in ultraviolet. More importantly, its unusual elongated orbit lets it stare down at the polar region for as long as 45 hours at a stretch. Earlier spacecraft could typically maintain comparable observations for around 15 hours, according to ESA.

Major geomagnetic storms can last two or three days. Instead of seeing scattered snapshots, researchers may now be able to watch much of a storm develop continuously.

Animation of coronal mass ejection hitting Earth. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

SMILE’s other instruments will track the solar wind and changes in Earth’s magnetic field. By comparing those measurements with the auroras below, scientists can see how activity from the Sun moves through Earth’s magnetic environment and ultimately produces auroral displays.

“Smile is now approved to begin science operations,” Carole Mundell, ESA’s director of science, said in the agency’s September 30 mission update.

These first pictures are therefore more of a preview. SMILE has shown that it can see auroras even when daylight hides them from us. Now scientists can begin watching what those ghostly lights reveal about storms unfolding far above our heads.