People from as far as Spain have spent the night flying towards Antarctica in the first commercial southern aurora flight - for just $2000 a pop.
Ian Griffin, from the Museum of Otago, told Morning Report he organised the flight after posting the idea on Facebook.
"This was all a bit of a punt, you know I put it all up on a Facebook group saying 'does anyone think this is a good idea', and it kind of went from there to taking off last night."
He said the trip reached latitude 66° south, and was a great success.
"So we managed to fly right the way through the southern aurora oval, and we got some astonishing pictures and some really lovely video, so in that respect it was a big success.
"Certainly a lot of happy people, maybe some people - you know, to be fair ... maybe they were expecting really bright kind of laser beam-type stuff in the sky which isn't quite what we saw," he said.
"But we certainly got there, crossed the oval - we actually flew all the way through it, which was pretty amazing - and got back in time for a nice breakfast in Dunedin."
He said the 130 tickets on the Boeing 767 were limited to window seats and cost $4000 per pair for economy class or $8000 for business class, but still sold out in five days.
"So the flight itself was a really comfortable flight, there was lots of space and we all got really good views out of the windows, and nice food and drink too."
There was even a bit of time-travel involved.
"Because we crossed the international date line twice - we took off on the 23rd of March, we went back to the 22nd of March, then we went past midnight back to the 23rd then we crossed the date line again so we landed on the 24th - so we had three complete days in eight hours."
