USA to France in two minutes

After securing permission from Air France, entrepreneur and artist Nate Bolt carried a camera, tripod and time-lapse controller on board his flight from San Francisco to Paris, preparing to capture his journey in still photos clicked every few seconds. He lucked into an empty row, giving his camera unfettered window access.

Bolt's eyelids grew heavy as his camera clicked away, amassing what would finally be more than 2,400 shots. The aurora borealis woke him up.

"I had no idea the northern lights were going to occur," he told ABC News. "I was kind of half-asleep holding the time lapse controller in my hand ... just looked up to check the exposure, and it was kind of one of those things where I had no idea what was wrong at first.

"I thought there was film stuck on the lens, or it was some light refracting down, and once I scrolled back a few and I realized what it was, I was excited. I was stoked," he said.

Back on terra firma, Bolt spent about as much time stringing photos together as he did in the air on his 11-hour flight. He supplemented the results with a few pictures taken on his iPhone.

The resulting film lasts two minutes and carries viewers from San Francisco liftoff (3:35 p.m.); above the polar regions, where Bolt's Canon captured stunning footage of the northern lights glowing green above the plane wing; and onto the Charles de Gaulle Airport runway (11:10 a.m.).