90 • DECEMBER 2021
lights, which they call aqsarniit. They
are said to be the spirits of the dead
playing football, usually with a walrus
skull. The aqsarniit were traditionally
considered dangerous because they
move so quickly and heedlessly
in their pursuit. It’s been said that
the Sámi people, of Fennoscandia,
believed that the aurora, called
guovsahasat, could swoop down and
burn a person. Women would cover
their heads to keep the aurora out of
their hair, people kept silent to avoid
irritating it, and bells were taken off
reindeer when the aurora was bright.
Early European and Asian observers
thought the aurora was a heavenly
battle, a line of enormous candles, or
a fissure in the sky. Edmond Halley—
the early 18th-century astronomer
of Halley’s Comet fame—theorised
that it was the result of water vapour
somehow igniting the atmosphere
after being released from fissures on
Earth’s surface.
The aurora is only a few hundred
metres thick, since it follows the lines
of our planet’s magnetic field. But it is
also immense, hundreds of kilometres
wide and high, and it occurs between
100 and 1,000 kilometres above
the earth, in the ionosphere. The
International Space Station flies
through this range. The lights cannot
form lower in our skies because the
energy of colliding particles is lost as
the atmosphere becomes denser.
Each evening at Blachford Lake, we
waited. The intensity of the aurora
depends on many factors: the roughly
11-year solar activity cycle and its
many effects; whether the solar wind
is steady or gusting; and the sun’s
rotation in relation to Earth’s. In photo:©ken^phung/shutterstockThe Aurora Village viewing area
and its collection of teepees