Aurora Borealis

No description can describe the splendor or the magnificence of the natural phenomenon known as the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. The Northern lights have been described in ancient times by the Eskimos, American Indians, world explorers and was even mentioned in the Old Testament. Ben Franklin, Aristotle, Descartes, Edmund Halley, Goethe, and Henry Cavendish have all been fascinated by this array of lights in the night sky, and have all written papers about them.

The Aurora Borealis encircles the entire Polar Regions. People on earth only see a small part of the display as the lowest sections of the Aurora are about 40 miles from the ground. Astronauts looking down on the polar region from space have a better view of the phenomenon as the Aurora extends up to 600 miles above the earth.

On some occasions, when the Aurora reached the middle latitudes of France and Italy, it struck fear into the population. When the lights reached these latitudes, they were a dark red in color and thought of as an ill omen signifying the blood of battle. Every Northern culture has legends about the lights and often associates them with life after death. The Tlingits and Eyak Indians of Southeastern Alaska consider them a sure sign of impending battle. They believe that someone would be killed when the lights put on their cosmic display. But the only Eskimo group that considered the Aurora an evil thing was the Point Barrow Eskimos. They believed this so deeply, that they used to carry knives to keep it away.

The Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska is a major station for the study of the lights with specialized cameras and improved spectroscopes. It was found that the displays were caused by magnetic disturbances from the sun, which produced light when colliding with atoms in the upper atmosphere. Sc