The Northern Lights...Finland's Natural Lights Show The winter is gloomy in northern Finland. In the most northern regions of Lapland, the sun remains below the horizon for weeks at a time. But the people who live there have the mysteriously flickering Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights to compensate for the lack of sunlight and warmth. The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are beautiful, dynamic, luminous displays seen in the night sky. Over the years, the Northern Lights have had many names and myths attributed to it: In ancient Greece it was sometimes termed "blood rain"; the Germans called it "heaven light"; the Eskimo name was "sky dwellers" In earlier times, the people of Lapland used to believe that the purple, red, yellow, orange, green and blue lights that sometimes flickered in the sky were caused by a giant fox swishing its tail across the snow-clad crests of the Arctic hills. Glowing red lights have been seen as harbingers of war. Many older people in Finland still remember that the sky--even above the southern part of the country--was blood red just before the outbreak of the Winter War in late 1939. The mystery of the lights in the sky also prompted a search for a scientific explanation. In the 19th century, they were suspected to be sunlight reflected onto the firmament by ice caps and glaciers in the polar regions. Other scientists speculated that they were caused by dust from meteorites burning up as they raced into the atmosphere. In 1887, Norwegian physicist Olof Birkeland discovered that the Aurora Borealis--and its southern counterpart, the Aurora Australis--were caused by particles from the sun colliding with the upper layers of the atmosphere above the polar regions. Thus, the ultimate source of the lights is the sun, which emits a constant stream of charged particles...the solar wind. These particles are guided by the Earth's magnetic field towards both poles, where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the rarefied upper layers of the atmosphere. The particles impart an energy charge to the atoms with which they collide. But this energized state is unstable, and the atoms tend to return to the original state by emitting the surplus energy in the form of visible light. The color of the light depends on what kinds of particles hit atoms or molecules.Red and greenish-yellow hues are produced by oxygen atoms. Blues and violets flash on the sky when electrons collide with nitrogen. North Finland is an ideal vantage point for studying the Aurora Borealis. For more than 10 years, Finnish scientists and colleagues from Sweden, Norway, Britain, France, and Germany have been collaborating in a program called EISCAT to study near space phenomena. Professor Pekka Tanskanen of Oulu University is one of the scientists who has been studying the Aurora Borealis for years. He says that space research, like any other basic research, often leads to tangible benefits for humankind. ”Right now, for example," Tanskanen explains, "we are interested in finding whether solar disturbances can be predicted. If that proves possible, it will enable us to prepare for the effects of those disturbances on Earth. Powerful electrical fluxes taking place in the magnetic field can sometimes cause disturbances in power transmission networks."  Solar disturbances can sometimes have spectacular effects. Example: The power failure that blacked out a large part of New York state for several hours in the early 1970's. Information for this article was supplied by the Finnish Tourist Board and Finnair Blue Wings magazine.  Photographs are Copyright ©Jouni Jussila.