Photos show the lights illuminating the sky in vivid color across the U.S. this week. They'll be visible again in some states on Thursday.

Skies over North America erupted this week with shimmering colors: Shades of pink, purple and green swayed across the skies in Northern as well as some Southern states. It followed two similarly prolific auroral displays in North America in October and May of 2024.

Auroras may be visible from Alaska to Illinois as an incoming coronal mass ejection could spark severe geomagnetic storm conditions overnight.

Solar storms​ may bring the colorful northern lights, or aurora borealis, back to North Georgia on Wednesday night.

Increased solar activity causes auroras that dance around Earth’s poles, known as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and southern lights, or aurora australis. When the energized particles from coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create different colored lights in the sky.

The northern lights occur as a consequence of solar activity and result from collisions of charged particles in the solar wind colliding with molecules in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The best conditions to view the lights are when the sky is dark and clear of any clouds.

Bands of green and red first pierced through the hazy night sky around 9:30 p.m. above the pier at Grand Haven State Park.