In May of this year we saw the most remarkable display of Northern lights I’ve seen since I was a boy living on the Canadian Prairies a half century ago. Today I live about an hour’s drive south of the Canadian border in the Idaho Panhandle, so it was further to the south than my boyhood home, but not by too much. This display of the Northern lights completely filled the night sky — from north to south, east to west! Truly a memorable display of the aurora borealis!
Humans have been fascinated by displays of the aurora for thousands of years. Innuits thought the lights were the souls of dead people playing football with a walrus head. In China and Russia, people thought they were associated with dragons.
Today we understand that the Northern Lights are caused by an interaction of the sun and our planet’s magnetic field. The sun ejects charged particles into space, especially when there is a solar flare. These particles move into space (“solar wind”) and are attracted to our magnetic center near the North Pole. When they hit the earth’s atmosphere they cause photons of light to be released. Red aurorae are rare and caused by excited oxygen molecules at the furthest point in the atmosphere — about 200 kms from the earth’s surface. Green aurorae are caused by oxygen and nitrogen — typically about 100 km up. Blue aurora form at lower altitudes and are caused by nitrogen.
But enough of the science. These lights were beautiful, moving in the sky. Some seemed like straight beams. Others were broader waving fields of light. We snapped some hand-held photos on my wife’s iPhone, which are interspersed in this post. I was surprised at how well they captured this experience.
We probably spent an hour wandering around our property (which has lots of open sky views), photographing what we saw. I’ll never forget it.
