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Splendour in the sky How to watch Effects of Aurora Borealis Beliefs of indigenous people The Northern Lights in HistoryRelated sites
Splendour in the sky |
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| My earliest recollection of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, is from a song of the 1950s called "the Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen", which I always took to be a reference not to Scottish traffic arrangements but to the celestial phenomenon of bands, curtains or streamers of coloured light that appear in the sky predominantly in the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the earth. In the Antarctic, the lights are called the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights. They are visible, though less frequently, also outside those zones. I do not know how often the Northern Lights appear in northern Scotland but in the far north of this country, in Finnish Lapland, the number of auroral displays can be as high as 200 a year. In southern Finland the number is usually fewer than 20. |
Folklore abounds with explanations of the origins of the spellbinding celestial lights. In Finnish
they are called "revontulet", which means "fox fires" a name derived from an ancient fable of
the arctic fox starting fires fire or spraying up snow with its brush-like tail. No matter that in
English "foxfire" is a luminescent glow emitted by certain types of fungi growing on rotten wood.
The true story is that the sun is the father of the auroras.
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