Watch: ‘Watermelon aurora’ shimmers over Alaska

Video captured a vibrant "watermelon aurora" shimmering across the night sky above Alaska. 

The colorful aurora danced above the snow-covered treetops in Fairbanks and Vincent Ledvina, a photographer, managed to capture the spectacle. 

"These red and green colors together look like watermelon, so I call it watermelon aurora," Ledvina said. 

FILE - Still image taken from video showing a "watermelon aurora" light up the night sky over Alaska.

Aurora borealis, or the northern lights, happen in the Northern Hemisphere and are caused when charged particles from the sun create solar wind that eventually crashes into Earth's atmosphere. 

The color of the lights will vary from green or yellow to red, pink and purple, depending on the type of gas molecules in Earth's magnetic field. 

Solar wind can cause geomagnetic storms and aurora lights, but the more intense geomagnetic storms come from solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) when the sun releases a billion tons of plasma and hits Earth's magnetic field. 

Storyful and FOX Weather contributed to this report. This story was reported from Los Angeles.