Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

The northern lights vie with a waxing moon over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Monday night.

One look at SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery will tell you that February has been a very good month for auroral displays in northern latitudes, and an upswing in solar activity promises more to come.

One of the hot spots is Sweden's Abisko National Park, which is the favorite hangout for Chad Blakley of Lights Over Lapland. "We have seen powerful auroras in the sky above Abisko for 13 nights in a row, and it looks like there are more to come!" he wrote in an email Tuesday. "Last night I witnessed one of the finest aurora displays I have seen in many months. February 2013 is turning out to be one of the best months for aurora watching I have ever seen!"

You can get a sense of how Blakley's nights have been going by taking a minute to watch Blakley's time-lapse video below. But don't stop there: I'm also including a time-lapse from Helge Mortensen, a photographer based in Tromso, Norway, and from Oli Haukur and the OZZO Photography team in Iceland.

Scandinavia, Alaska and northern Canada are all hot spots for the northern lights this time of year, even though it gets chilly at night. The auroral displays might dip farther south if we get a nice geomagnetic storm coming our way, and the solar weather outlook suggests that could happen. A new sunspot region known as AR 1678 has cropped up, and SpaceWeather.com says this region could give rise to "a significant solar flare."

Check out the usual places for space weather updates, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center as well as the center's Facebook page and its Ovation aurora forecast chart. You'll also want to keep tabs on the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX website — and the Lights Over Lapland Facebook page, where you'll find an awesome image of the aurora glowing beside a moon halo.

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights boosted by 'The Blob'
• PhotoBlog's northern-lights archive
• Slideshow: Aurora's greatest hits

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thomas Kast

The northern lights glow over a snowy Finnish landscape in a photo taken on the night of Jan. 16-17 by Thomas Kast. Watch the time-lapse video on Vimeo.

"The Blob" from the sun has come and gone, sparking nothing more than beautiful views of the northern lights — and there could be more blobs to come.

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reported that a "plasma blob" of electrically charged particles was thrown out from the sun in Earth's direction — but that the outburst, also known as a coronal mass ejection or CME, wouldn't disrupt satellite systems or electrical power grids when it swept past us on Thursday.

The blob did register on the geomagnetic scale, but well below hazardous levels, just as the center predicted. And although there were no flashy light shows reported in America's Lower 48 states, the northern lights were dancing in high-latitude regions. Thomas Kast caught his first aurora of the new year in the skies over Rokua in Finland.

Kast said the vantage point for the picture you see here is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his home — and the temperatures dipped down to 16 below zero Fahrenheit (-27 degrees Celsius). "I spent more than four hours at that spot," Kast said. "It takes time, but it's so rewarding."

If you like the picture above, you'll love the video version that Kast has just posted to his Vimeo gallery. To see more of Kast's photos, check out his Facebook page as well as his posting to SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery.

Göran Strand saw this week's auroral show from the Kall area in the Swedish municipality of Åre, where the temperature was 11 below zero F (-24 degrees C). "When we arrived at the location and stepped out of the car, a moose stepped out of the forest and looked at us, and it looked a bit surprised finding us there in the middle of the night," Strand said in an email.

"It turned out to be a fantastic night with a half moon that lit up the landscape in a lovely way," Strand told SpaceWeather.com." In the background you can the mountain Åreskutan, the biggest ski resort in Sweden."

For more astrophotography from Strand, click on over to his Astrofotografen website and his Facebook page.

Goran Strand

Swedish astrophotographer Goran Strand captured this view of an aurora lighting up the night sky above a moonlit landscape. The constellation Orion, the Pleiades and the planet Jupiter also gleam in the skies above.

Stian Rekdal

The northern lights compete with the city lights of Ålesund, Norway, in a picture taken by Stian Rekdal.

Meanwhile, in Norway, Stian Rekdal lucked into a glittering photograph of natural and artificial lights.

"It was taken from the viewpoint of Fjellstua (literal translation, 'the mountain lodge'), which is approximately 400 feet above the town of Ålesund," Rekdal wrote in an email. "Aurorae are not as common here as farther north. This part of Norway is also prone to cloudy weather, further decreasing the odds of spotting them. So last night was a rare treat."

Check out more of Rekdal's aurora imagery at the 500px photo website, or the Vimeo video portal. As a bonus, you can feast your eyes on Rekdal's Vimeo video below — but be sure to watch it at full-screen and high-resolution. Then click through our slideshow of the greatest hits from the northern (and southern) lights.

Slideshow: Lights in the sky

Click through stunning images of the auroral displays created by geomagnetic storms.

Launch slideshow

The Space Weather Prediction Center says that two more coronal mass ejections are heading toward Earth — but like the earlier plasma blob, these outbursts "are not expected to be very strong." To find out where auroral displays are expected to glow, check NOAA's Ovation chart, the prediction center's website, the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute's aurora indicator or SpaceWeather.com. And if you snap a great picture of the aurora, feel free to share it via the Cosmic Log Facebook page or NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page.

Update for 3 a.m. ET Jan. 21: Aurora photographer Chad Blakley took the stunning still imagery he captured on Jan. 19 and assembled into this must-see time-lapse video on Vimeo. "The solar blob you wrote about last week has made its way to Earth!" he wrote in an email. For more, check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland website and Facebook page.

More auroral glories:

• Top spots to see the northern lights
• Video: Northern lights captured on camera
• Cosmic Log archive on auroras

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

Auroral lights glow in the skies over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Jan. 13.

It might sound scary to hear that a giant blob of solar plasma is heading straight for us, but don't panic: Space weather forecasters say this solar outburst should deliver nothing more than a spectacular show up north.

"We're not going to be in for a big disturbance," said Norm Cohen, senior forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado. "The northern tier of the United States might be able to see aurorae."

The outburst of electrically charged plasma — also known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME — blasted out from the sun on Jan. 13, sparking a radio blackout. It's taken several days for the blob itself to travel the 93 million miles between the sun and here, but forecasters now expect it to sweep over Earth's magnetic field early to midday Thursday.

When strong solar storms interact with the magnetosphere, they can spark satellite outages and disrupt electric power grids. Fortunately, this one shouldn't be that strong. (In geekspeak, let's just say that the maximum Kp is expected to reach no higher than 4. NOAA's space weather scale lays out the effects associated with higher Kp levels. Check out the prediction center's Facebook page for space weather updates.)

The most visible effect should be the northern lights generated by the interaction between the electrically charged solar particles and atoms in Earth's upper atmosphere, as explained on the "Causes of Color" website. This week's geomagnetic flare-up should add to what's already been a great week for auroral displays in northern latitudes.

Chad Blakley, a photographer at Sweden's Abisko National Park, sent in the beauty you see above. "It looks like there may be more powerful auroras in the days ahead," Blakley said in an email. "It is a very good time to be an aurora photographer!"

For more of Blakley's beauties, check out the Lights Over Lapland website or the LOL Facebook page.

Glowing reports are coming in from space as well. Here's a picture captured by the Department of Defense's DMSP F-18 OLS low-light imager on Jan. 13. The green outlines show Ireland and Britain down south, and Iceland and Scandinavia up north. The ghostly wisps crossing the frame are the northern lights. It's conceivable that the bright streaks you see in this satellite picture are the same ones visible in Blakley's pictures.

DOD via Mark Conner / SpaceWeather.com

The northern lights show up as ghostly streaks of white in a satellite picture captured on Jan. 13 by a low-light imager on the Defense Department's DMSP F-18 meteorological satellite.

Are there more solar blasts heading our way? SpaceWeather.com notes that a complex sunspot region known as AR1654 is pointing in our direction and has the potential to send more big blobs of plasma our way. But Cohen said the worries about that particular sunspot have been receding.

"It's been fairly quiet in terms of flare production," he said. "If anything, it's beginning to show signs of decay."

In fact, there's been increasing talk that this year's expected peak of the sun's 11-year activity cycle could be relatively wimpy. Cohen said he didn't want to make that sweeping of a prediction — but he did admit that there hasn't been as much disruption as some people might have feared.

"The activity hasn't been all that impressive yet," he said.

More auroral glories:

• Top spots to see the northern lights
• Video: Northern lights captured on camera
• Cosmic Log archive on auroras

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Scientists say that a "Martian flower," seen here in an image from the Curiosity rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, is a 2-millimeter-wide grain or pebble that's embedded in the surrounding rock. Another, darker-colored mineral grain can be seen above and to the left.

The scientists behind NASA's $2.5 billion Curiosity rover mission on Mars on Tuesday explained the nature of a tiny, gleaming "flower" embedded in Red Planet rock, and revealed where they'll be using the SUV-sized robot's drill for the first time.

Both those developments point to the same happy discovery: The place where the rover is working was almost certainly formed through the action of water — and seems likely to provide new insights into the planet's geological history. "This is something that we've waited patiently for," Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist, told journalists during a NASA teleconference.

The "Martian flower" made a splash on the Internet, in part because it looked so different from the surrounding rock in a microscopic-scale picture from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. Few people thought it was actually a flower, though it looked a bit like one. Was it a piece of plastic from the rover itself? An unusual type of mineral?

The Planetary Science Institute's R. Aileen Yingst, deputy principal investigator for the MAHLI team, delivered the expert verdict. It's a relatively large mineral grain, or "a pebble, if you wish," measuring about a tenth of an inch (2 millimeters) wide. "It could be a lot of things, but without some chemical information to back me up, I'd really hesitate to say what it is," she said.

She pointed out that a couple of similar, darker-colored grains could be seen embedded nearby. The important thing is what such rounded grains have to say about the scene's history. "They've been knocked around, they've been busted up. They've been rounded by some process," she said. That suggests that running water helped form the rock, which has been nicknamed Gillespie Lake.

Drill, rover, drill
Five months after its landing, the six-wheeled Curiosity rover is surrounded by plenty of additional evidence that water had a hand in shaping the landscape billions of years ago. That's why Grotzinger and his colleagues have decided to put the rover's heavy-duty drill to work for the first time on a flat spread of rock called "John Klein." The name pays tribute to John W. Klein, a former deputy project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory mission who died in 2011.

"John's leadership skill played a crucial role in making Curiosity a reality," Richard Cook, the mission's project manager, said in a news release.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This image of an outcrop at the "Sheepbed" locality, taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover with its right MastCam on Dec. 13, show well-defined veins filled with whitish minerals, interpreted as calcium sulfate. These veins form when water circulates through fractures, depositing minerals along the sides of the fracture, to form a vein. This is Curiosity's first close look at minerals that formed within water that percolated within a subsurface environment.

Cook told reporters that the first drilling operation would probably take place in the next two weeks, after additional rounds of engineering tests and scientific study.

"The scientists have been let into the candy store," he said.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the site is that it's shot through with light-toned veins of calcium-rich material. "On Earth, forming veins like these requires water circulating in fractures," said Nicolas Mangold of the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes in France. Mangold is a member of the team behind Curiosity's laser-equipped Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam.

'A whole different world'
Grotzinger marveled at how different the terrain is from the spot where Curiosity landed, even though both are within Mars' 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater. The rover's current base of operations, nestled in a shallow depression called Yellowknife Bay, has a type of bedrock that cools more slowly each night than the surrounding terrain. "We don't know what's causing the change," Grotzinger said.

"It's like we entered a whole different world," he said.

The drill at the end of Curiosity's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm has not yet been used, but mission managers will command it to drill a series of holes going as deep as 2 inches (5 centimeters) into the rock. The first test holes will serve to clean off any leftover earthly contamination, Cook said. Grotzinger said the drill will eventually produce scientific samples to be fed into the rover's onboard chemical labs, known as CheMin and SAM.

"What we're hoping to do is sample both the vein-filling material as well as what we call the country rock around it," he said.

Before Curiosity's landing, NASA reported that small amounts of Teflon and other material from the drill might contaminate the rock samples. On Tuesday, Cook said the scientists "could work around" the contamination issue by accounting for the unwanted chemicals when they did their analysis.

Curiosity's two-year-long primary mission is aimed at determining whether Mars could have had the chemical building blocks required for life as we know it. Eventually, the 1-ton rover will make its way to a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in Gale Crater, but Grotzinger said scientists wanted to take ample time to investigate the mysteries they're finding along the way.

More about Curiosity's mission:

• Family gets back down to Earth after living on Mars time
• Rover gives Martian rock its first brushoff
• Curiosity studies a 'flower' on Mars
• Cosmic Log archive on Curiosity

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow

Chris Hadfield via Google+

Australian wildfire: Look closely, you can see the flames from orbit ...

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is making a name for himself as the International Space Station's first Canadian commander, the "Singing Spaceman" and Star Trek skipper William Shatner's Twitter buddy — but he's also one heck of a photographer.

Since his arrival at the station on Dec. 21, Hadfield has posted more than 100 pictures to Twitter and Google+, most of them showing amazing views of Earth below. Between his official duties and his unofficial Earth-watching sessions, how does he find time to sleep?

"Yes, I should sleep more on station," he told one follower, "but the view from the window is like a perpetual magnet, too wondrous to ignore."

The space station's six residents all take turns behind the lens, but some astronauts take the job way more seriously than others: Notable shooters from past orbital stints include NASA's Scott Kelly, Douglas Wheelock, Ron Garan and Don Pettit, as well as Japan's Soichi Noguchi and Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers. Hadfield is sure to take his place among them.

His favorite hangout is the seven-windowed Cupola observation deck, which provides an unparalleled view of Earth. His favorite camera? "We use primarily Nikon F2s and F3s, with a variety of lenses," he said on Twitter. "We even take them out on spacewalks, into the hard vacuum."

To get those awesome pictures of Earth landscapes, he brings out the Big Lens. "The big lens is Nikkor 600 mm, used with a 2-fold converter = 1200 mm," he tweeted. "Available for just US$10,300."

When you consider that the space station's crew is delivering pictures that no one on Earth can, that seems like a small price to pay. Check out a few of the recent masterpieces from outer space:

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Chris Hadfield photographing Earth from the International Space Station's Cupola, using the big lens. http://pic.twitter.com/kL9iQdAN

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Australia: The dryness creates colors and textures that make the Outback immediately recognizable from space. http://pic.twitter.com/0D4lvgJt

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

It's hard to believe the colours of the Bahamas from space. http://pic.twitter.com/0DhYXmel

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Humans need straight lines, nature doesn't. Indecisive river and orderly farmers, central Asia. http://pic.twitter.com/BIL8Syqw

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Seattle, WA: Look carefully, you can see Pike Place Market. http://pic.twitter.com/0OFm0iO0

Chris Hadfield via Twitter

Glacier tongues in the Himalayas. http://pic.twitter.com/A9xe7AfG

Correction for 8 p.m. ET Jan. 8: The original headline for this item called Hadfield the space station's skipper, but it's a little too early to call him that. NASA astronaut Kevin Ford is currently the station commander, and Hadfield is a flight engineer. Hadfield will take on the title of commander when Ford heads back down to Earth in March.

Update for 1 p.m. ET Jan. 9: I've added a link to Hadfield's Google+ page as well as a couple of fresh images, showing the Australian wildfires and a Central Asian landscape.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A photographic mosaic shows the Curiosity rover's surroundings at a Martian location known as Yellowknife Bay. This view has been assembled from black-and-white images captured by the rover's navigation camera on Sol 132 (Dec. 19). Gaps in imagery of the Martian sky have been filled in, and the whole scene has been colorized. Click here or on the image to see the complete 360-degree panorama.

The cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover have been clicking away over the holidays — gathering enough pictures for a 360-degree panorama of its rocky surroundings at Yellowknife Bay, plus a close-up view showing a "Martian flower" seemingly sprouting from the surface.

The panorama was assembled from pictures snapped by the rover's navigation camera system on the 132nd Martian day of Curiosity's mission on the Red Planet, also known as Sol 132 or Dec. 19.

In this case, the folks doing the assembling are Ken Kremer, a New Jersey-based journalist, research chemist and photographer; and Marco Di Lorenzo, a physicist who's a high-school educator and photographer in Italy. They stitched together the black-and-white images, filled in the gaps in the Martian sky and colorized the scene to reflect what an observer on Mars might see.

We've featured the efforts of Kremer and Di Lorenzo several times before: They're part of an active online community that makes use of the raw images provided by Curiosity and other Mars probes, and then shares them via websites such as UnmannedSpaceflight.com. Even now, the folks at UnmannedSpaceflight are posting plenty of amazing pictures from Yellowknife Bay, including a must-see, zoomable GigaPan version. 

Another picture from Sol 132 has stirred up some buzz at the Above Top Secret discussion forum. The picture focuses in on a bright, crumpled object that's sitting on a Martian outcrop, as seen by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. The translucent shape is reminiscent of a flower's pistils, which led one of the forum's members to call it a "Martian flower."   

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

An anomalous bit of bright material can be seen left of center in this view captured by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager on Sol 132 of the mission (Dec. 19).

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: I initially suspected that the flower was a tiny shred of plastic from the rover itself. Such a shred popped up in October. At that time, experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory surmised that the plastic may have been a bit of wrapping that was knocked loose from the Mars Science Laboratory's descent stage during the spacecraft's August landing. The plastic was thought to have fallen on top of the rover, and then dropped to the ground weeks later.

That's what led me to go with the plastic-scrap hypothesis. However, some of the folks commenting on the pictures noted that the object seemed to be embedded in the rock — which would argue against my hypothesis. So I put in an inquiry with Guy Webster, who serves as JPL's main spokesman for NASA's Mars missions.

A couple of hours later, Webster emailed me the verdict: "That appears to be part of the rock, not debris from the spacecraft."

Mystery solved? It's certainly an intriguing bit of mineral that stands out prominently in the MAHLI picture. If I find out anything more, I'll be sure to pass it along. And if it turns out that flowers are really sprouting up on Mars, you'll know it's time to cue up the "X-Files" theme. Either way, the truth is out there.  

More pictures from Kremer and Di Lorenzo:

• Scenes from Mars' 'Promised Land'
• Rover checks out its belly on Mars
• Curiosity adds color to Martian peak
• Mars rover points to its destination
• Still more from KenKremer.com

More about Martian anomalies:

• Opportunity's rover rotini
• Spirit's 'Mermaid on Mars'
• Opportunity's bunny ears
• Phoenix's Martian spring

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars and see the pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow