The Northern Lights

The northern lights are a magnificent phenomenon in the sky that unveil themselves on a star-spangled firmament in the polar night.  As the last feeble solar rays leave the arctic region for a few weeks every winter, the northern lights appear as an inspiring source of fantasy and luminous draperies.   There are always surprises in store when the northern lights dance in the endless space between science and poesy.  While the sun and the planets wander in known fixed orbits in the sky, the northern lights are unpredictable, they never look the same, do not obey mathematical formulas, and press forward ignoring the laws of physics. Northern lights begin to appear around the end of August, when the nights get darker.  Lapland displays its northern lights approximately 200 nights a year, but in the summer season the sky is too light for us to see the northern lights.

At their best, the northern lights shine blue and red and green as a changing veil in the night sky with a power we can hardly conceive.  This shower of colours rises towards the heavens and the auroral corona, born over one's head, crowns the spectacle created by the solar wind. In olden times people in Finland believed that up in the north there is a giant fox and when the fox move its tail, it creates the Northern Lights. So in Finnish we call the Northern Lights Revontulet, which means fox fires. In the 17th century the Northern lights were given their scientific name – aurora borealis.  Galileo Galilei used the name aurora borealis as early as 1616. Even though nowadays there is a scientific explanation for the northern lights, it is still nicer to watch them and let your imagination wander through tales of old. Cave drawings have been discovered in France, which depict these skylights dating back 30,000 years. The oldest written documentation on the northern lights date approximately from 2600 BC. When Fu - Pao, the mother of the Yellow Empire Shuan – yuan, saw strong lightning moving around the star Su, the light illuminated the whole area.  After that she became pregnant.   Today, newly weds from different country's travel here to spend their honeymoon. Their biggest wish is to see the northern lights.  Some oft the hotels have a northern lights wake-up call, and when the northern lights appear, everyone runs out to see, even in their pyjamas.