The idea is that the reference to “space” was originally supposed to just be an instruction to include a space separating the words International and Station, but instead was included as the second word.
Groan, and these extra words to keep discord 
Cf. “Flight of the Conchords”:
PRODUCER: That’s “Martin_Clark@aol.com.”
JERMAINE: “Underscore” is your middle name?
It would have been clearer if ponytail had actually said “International Station!”, including the exclamation point.
And the alt-text shouldn’t have its own exclamation point.
Yeah, that too.
Could be worse, the “The Quote Literally International Space Station Exclamation Point End Quote”.
“The Quote Literally International Space Station Exclamation Point End Quote and Underline Literally I Don’t Know Why This Is So Hard.”
Reminds me of one of my favorite smbc comics:
Or, from one of Hofstadter’s books,
“This sentence is difficult to translate into French”.
From my experience seeing them on (I think) 8 different occasions, he’s very much not wrong. Every time was different, and the best ones morphed between different kinds. And yes, those beautiful photographs you see? It sometimes really does actually look like that.
In your opinion, how does the aurora compare to total solar eclipse? I have seen the latter but never the northern lights (not for want of trying).
I’ve been able to see solar eclipses during the day, when it wasn’t really cold out. 
Solar eclipse is more spectacular.
They are very different. A solar eclipse is a bizarre event, that triggers a primal reaction.
I’ve seen the northern lights three times. Once in Canada, in the woods. Once on an airplane. And once in Germany in a town.
The first time was in Canada. And there were brilliant lines on the sky. In fact, i thought someone must be advertising with giant search lights. (Something a company did when i was a kid.) But they didn’t go all the way to the ground, and sometimes changed where they were “from”. And we were too far away from any urban areas for that to make sense. It took me a while to realize it was the northern lights.
The second time was on an airplane, and it was hard to see, but kind of cool.
The third time it was so faint that i wouldn’t have believed i saw it at all, except i was there with an astronomer, who pointed out that the sky was a little lighter than it ought to be, and suggested trying to photograph it with a long exposure. The photograph clearly showed colorful northern lights.
Only the first came close to an eclipse. It was, in some ways, showier. But it didn’t trigger that primal “something’s wrong” that the eclipse did.
It seems I missed them again tonight. As always.
Yeah, I think I’d agree with @puzzlegal (and @Northern_Piper , in less detail). Weird lights in the sky are beautiful, but there are enough different phenomena that fit into that category (rainbows, halos, sun dogs, iridescent clouds, etc.) that we’re sort of conditioned to expect weird lights in the sky as being something normal. An eclipse, though, is nothing like anything you’ve ever seen.
Plus, I’ve seen northern lights all my life. They’re not extraordinary events, unlike a total solar eclipse, which I’ve only seen once.
Never seen northern lights or the Milky Way; city dweller with lots of light pollution.