French astronaut Sophie Adenot has shared photographs of an aurora display from the International Space Station, describing it as the most intense the crew has seen since launching to orbit in February this year.
Adenot posted the images on Day 127 of her mission, which the station logged as orbit 1968. The post was shared across ESA and NASA's official channels.
Writing about the sighting, Adenot said the aurora was "absolutely spectacular," adding that it "shimmered and danced" beneath the station while stretching as far as she could see in every direction.
She said the display was bright enough to illuminate the station itself in shades of green — something she described as standing apart from every other aurora sighting during the mission.
"We've seen several since the beginning of the mission, but this one was on a completely different level — far too bright for my usual aurora camera settings," she wrote.
Adenot also noted that the display drew the entire crew to the station's windows at once, with everyone competing for a good vantage point to watch.
The images she shared show vivid green light stretching across the Earth's atmosphere, as seen from the station's altitude of roughly 400 kilometres above the surface.
The sighting is part of Adenot's εpsilon mission, a nine-month assignment to the ISS that began on 13 February 2026.
Who is Sophie Adenot?
Sophie Adenot was born in 1982 in France. She studied engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse, specialising in spacecraft and aircraft flight dynamics, before completing a Master of Science in human factors engineering at MIT in 2004.
She joined the French Air Force in 2005 and trained as a helicopter pilot, later graduating with honours as a helicopter test pilot from the Empire Test Pilots' School in the United Kingdom in 2018.
Over her career, Adenot logged 3,000 flight hours across 22 different helicopter types and served as a search and rescue pilot, a formation flight leader, and a mission captain. She also holds a military parachute licence, a light aircraft pilot licence, and a glider pilot licence.
In November 2022, she was selected as an ESA astronaut candidate. She completed basic training and received her astronaut certification at ESA's European Astronaut Centre in April 2024, before being announced for her first spaceflight mission the following month.
