LIGHT SHOW

Serendipity makes life interesting. Unplanned events are the spice of life. Although most things astronomical can be predicted well in advance, some things seem random. To be clear, the aurora (called aurora borealis, or northern lights, when occurring in the Northern Hemisphere) is an atmospheric phenomena and not strictly astronomical, but it is caused by something celestial: activity on our sun.

We can predict the sun’s general activity, but not the details, and one of the details are explosive flares that eject particles out into space. Some of these may sweep by Earth, where they are ducted by our magnetic field down to the magnetic poles and excite atoms in our atmosphere to glow—like a fluorescent tube, but without