Northern Lights - Nature's own fireworks
view photos

The Northern lights are poetry, they are nature's light show, and they are quantum leaps in the oxygen atom. They are elementary particle physics, superstition, mythology and fairy tales. The northern lights have filled people with wonder and inspired artists; they have frightened people to think that the end is at hand. More exact explanations of the phenomenon could not be given until modern particle physics were developed, and knowledge about details in the earths magnetosphere has been based on measurements from satellites.

The name
The northern lights have had a number of names through history. The scientific name for the phenomena is Aurora Borealis, which is Latin and translates into the red dawn of the north. It was the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who first used the expression. On the latitude where Galileo was living, northern lights consist of mainly red colour.