Magic Sky Lights or The Aurora Borealis

The polar lights.

       Since ancient times, people in many parts of the world have seen strange lights appear magically in the sky. Most people have seen them in the northern parts of the world and so they are usually called northern lights or aurora borealis. The lights also appear in the southern regions, where they are known as southern lights or aurora australis.
       These lights appear in different colors, such as white, pink, red, green, and yellow. They may take strange shapes in the sky. They may take the form of a great rainbow-like arc. They may appear as bands, or rays, or filmy curtains, fold upon fold in the sky. They may appear simply as a soft glow, or as a patch of light in the sky, or as a corona that looks like a burst of rays from a center point. Long before scientists discovered what caused these lights people were often terrified by them and very superstitious about them. Some believed that great armies warred in the sky and that heaven itself finally caught fire and burned. Today we know it is the bright, yellow, shining sun that causes the aurora.
       To us the sun seems warm and friendly, but it is really a terrifying mass of energy. We know this energy as the sun's heat and light. People can get really bad burns on their bodies if they stay in the sun for a long time, and they can be blinded by the sun's rays if they look right into it. Yet only a very small part of the sun's energy reaches the earth. It would take a candle twenty times the size of the earth to give as bright a light as the sun.
       Sometimes the surface of the sun is swept by terrible raging storms that are called sunspots. During these storms tiny particles shoot out of the sun millions of miles into space and touch our earth. When this happens our radio, telephone, and telegraph systems of communication are often made useless and we can do nothing about it. These particles, too small to be seen under a microscope, spout in streams from the sun like water being sprayed out of a gigantic fountain. They travel a thousand miles a second.
       At such a speed you could get from Chicago to New York before you could say Jiminy Cricket! The particles themselves do not reach the earth's surface. There is a sort of envelope around the earth protecting it from these speedy rays. This invisible envelope is formed by a magnetic field of force like the unseen field around a magnet that will pull objects to the magnet and hold them there. The
magnetic field around the earth pulls most of the sun's particles to the polar regions.
       When the sun's particles reach the upper part of our atmosphere they bump into the particles that make up our air. This causes the air particles, or atoms, to glow. When many of these air atoms are made to glow at one time, the light can be seen from the earth's surface below. This light sometimes seems to touch the earth but it actually occurs at least sixty miles or more above the earth's surface.
       Today scientists know what causes the auroras and can even predict them, for the lights seem to occur most often every eleven years . We know they occur most often in March and September and sometimes last for as long as from five to twelve months.
       Perhaps someday men will learn how to harness this energy from the sun and how to make it useful. Even if they don't, the aurora will remain the most beautiful of all sights in the night sky. Stromquist.

 Maciej Winiarczyk - "Night of the Northern Lights"