Aurora The Mysterious Northern Lights

Excerpt From Chapter 1: Airy Nothings It is dark. Not the phony dark of a modern, overlit city, but true dark and cold. The yellow glow of camp fades quickly behind us, eclipsed by the forest and the dense night.Two vague forms, our silhouettes muffled with winter clothes, we shuffle out of the spruce woods, through a thicket of willows and onto the surface of a small lake. A little distance into this clearing, my companion stops. "Look," she says quietly, waving a mittened hand. "Look up."Ribbons of frosty breath stream from our upturned faces. Far above, ribbons of soft greenish light stream across the sky. Aurora borealis, the northern lights.From horizon to horizon, misty dragons swim through the heavens. Green curtains billow and swirl. Fast-moving, sky-filling, tissues of gossamer. Through them in the farther distance, we can see the familiar pinpoint outlines of star patterns: Great Bear and her son, Little Bear; sinuous Draco; exact Cassiopeia; Polaris, the hub.Apart from the hush of our breathing, nothing can be heard. We lean our heads together and speak in whispers.We are grown women, my friend and I. Indeed, if the sombre truth is to be told, we are middle-aged -- well educated, well travelled, well read; and here, near the shore of Great Slave Lake in the Canadian territories, the northern lights are a privileged commonplace. We have often seen them before. Yet we stand transfixed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowy pond, watching the aurora dance overhead.By rights, we humans ought to live in constant wonderment, amazed by every star, cloud, tree, leaf, feather, fish and rock. Amazed by the supreme improbability of our own intricate existence. But except for a gifted few (artists and mystics), we lack the stamina for so much mystery. It takes a shock -- a sudden burst of beauty -- to wake us to the wonder of our reality.What power brings the sky to life with these soft, streaming curtains of light? How can they write themselves across the night and then vanish, without a trace, into the darkness? Where do they come from? Where do they go? What prompts them at one moment to hang quietly over the horizon, an unobtrusive arc of whitish light? At another, still formless and diffuse, to flutter in the zenith with a steady, flashing pulse? At yet another to unfurl themselves in rushing, swirling bands of green and pink that eddy, flow and crack the whip in the silence?Does all this heavenly glory have some deep meaning? What do the lights have to tell us about the mysterious stardust universe into which we are born?Around the world -- in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Russia, Australia and Japan -- researchers are seeking answers to these and other questions with persistence, creativity and a welcome touch of humour. In Alaska, for example, auroral studies are centred at a place called Poker Flats, a raffish collection of barracks and sheds that slouches in a deep, forested valley outside Fairbanks. Near the door of the main building, a large, official-looking notice announces the purpose of the facility. This is, the sign declares, the Center for the Study of Something which, on the face of it, might seem trivial, but on closer examination takes on Global Significance.There is more than a lick of truth in this playful pronouncement. Under the gaze of modern science, the polar lights have turned out to be even more wondrous than we had imagined. Seen from space, the aurora is revealed as two broken rings of light, each about 4000 kilometres in diameter, that hover over the polar regions of the earth. What's more, these haloes appear simultaneously and symmetrically in both the northern and southern hemispheres. While people in the North are watching a display of northern lights, a mirror-image array of southern lights is flickering above the heads of penguins in Antarctica. Day anSavage, Candace is the author of 'Aurora The Mysterious Northern Lights' with ISBN 9781552095836 and ISBN 1552095835.