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Northern Lights

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The northern lights  - one of natures most dazzling displays of colour occurs when the solar wind is trapped by the earth's magnetic field. Charged particles in the solar wind can enter the earth's atmosphere at the north and south magnetic poles. When these particles strike atoms in the atmosphere, the charge is passed on and excites the atmospheric atoms. This state is unstable and the atoms drop back to their normal state, and in this process each emits a photon of light. The colour of the light emitted varies, depending on the atom excited, (red is from oxygene, green is from nitrogen), and the energy change involved but, together, the product is the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.

You're most likely to see the northern lights during a peroid of high sunspot activity on a cool clear night in the northern lattitudes. Sunspot activity increases and decreases over an eleven year cycle. The next sunspot maximum wil be in the year 2002 but, activity has already built up to the point where you can see something. On occassion, in a sunspot maximum, you can see the northern lights in more southern lattitudes as in this example in Redrock Park in Sedona, Arizona in the USA.

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