The Northern Lights! Bucket List Item Completed!
While planning my trip to Alaska I had hoped to see the Northern Lights. One weekend while there, my daughter and I drove up north to Fairbanks in the hopes of seeing them. We found a good viewing spot and sat and waited…and waited! We waited several hours in the car, in about 10 degrees. Finally they began to appear. At first they were just a faint green line, which was exciting but I had hoped for more. We continued waiting in the car, in the COLD and hoped for them to really put on a good show. We were rewarded! They came back even brighter and danced and swayed their way across the sky! It was a beautiful moment and memory I will cherish. Did I tell you it was COLD? Because it was COLD. Colder than my NC blood liked but still SO worth it.
This is how they first looked…but it got better!
The aurora borealis, or northern lights, are stunning dancing waves of light that have captivated people for thousands, if not millions, of years in the Northern Hemisphere. But for all their beauty, this captivating light show is quite a violent event.
Then they began dancing across the sky…totally magical!
The lights are caused when energized particles from our sun slam into the upper atmosphere of Earth at speeds of up to 45 million mph. Thankfully Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the bombardment by deflecting these particles towards our two poles. There they react with our atmosphere and begin to fluoresce. What color we see is dependent upon what chemicals are present in the atmosphere at the time. If nitrogen molecules are present, we will see red lights and oxygen molecules will produce green lights.
They were named “aurora borealis” in 1619 by Galileo Galilei after Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind but the earliest suspected record dates back to a cave painting in France that is 30,000 years old! In the Southern Hemisphere they are known as the southern lights or aurora australis.
It takes patience to see them, there is no dedicated time frame or guarantee. Some nights they are visible early or later and some nights they are not visible at all.
