Above: Because NASA is awesome, they made an animation of an aurora from space (in this case, the Southern Lights), which should get you sufficiently stoked for our Northern version this weekend.

Normally you would have to trek up to Canada or Alaska (or fly to Iceland) to see the mind-warping cosmic color dance that is the Northern Lights.

But us lowly folk living below the 49th parallel in the Pacific Northwest might get a rare opportunity to see the show as soon as tonight (but definitely Friday and Saturday) thanks to a crazy “X class” solar flare that flew off the sun last night (uh, sweet). Expect the show to start around midnight.

The flare might mess with Earth’s geomagnetic field for a bit, making GPS signals and radio frequencies slightly wonky, but the wonderful side effect is that people in northern New England, the far northern Plains, and the Pacific Northwest will get unique front seats to the lights.

The aurora phenomenon occurs when charged particles in solar winds collide with the Earth’s magnetic field, releasing energy in the form of colorful photons. The altitude at which the solar particles collide with the Earth’s atmostphere determines the color of the aurora.