For the first time, scientists have captured the visible green lights of an aurora from the surface of Mars. The spectacle shined uniformly across the whole Martian night sky, distinct from the way auroras glow in more localized and varied patterns on Earth.

"It took three unsuccessful attempts before we got it right, but when we did, it appeared exactly as we had imagined it; as a diffuse green haze, uniform in all directions," Elise Knutsen, a researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a new paper published in the journal Science, told Gizmodo .