Here’s a shot of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, I took from just near McCarthy, in Wrangell St. Elias National Park, Alaska.

I was guiding a photo tour into the park, and we were late leaving Anchorage, due to delays with one of the guest’s flight to Alaska.

What Are the Northern Lights?

Wikipedia says this about the northern lights:

“Auroras are now known to be caused by the collision of charged particles (e.g. electrons), found in the magnetosphere, with atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere (at altitudes above 80 km). These charged particles are typically energized to levels between 1 thousand and 15 thousand electronvolts and, as they collide with atoms of gases in the atmosphere, the atoms become energized. Shortly afterwards, the atoms emit their gained energy as light. Light emitted by the Aurora tends to be dominated by emissions from atomic oxygen, resulting in a greenish glow (at a wavelength of 557.7 nm) and – especially at lower energy levels and at higher altitudes – the dark-red glow (at 630.0 nm of wavelength). “

Make sense? There you have it folks – the northern lights are tiny little things in the air, like dust, so small we can’t even see them, that glow because they crash into other tiny little things we can’t see. How cool is that?

They’re called the aurora borealis after the Roman Goddess of the dawn, ‘Aurora’, and the Greek god of Wind, “Borealis”. That sounds reasonable, except that the Aurora Borealis isn’t visible in either Greece or Rome.

Seems to me then we should allow people who do see them reguarly to name them. The Scottish called them “the merry dancers” or na fir-chlis.

The Scandinavians name for the northern lights translates as “herring flash”. It was believed that northern lights were the reflections cast by large swarms of herring onto the sky.

The name they gave the northern lights was “norðurljós” — which I have no idea how to pronounce. The Norse folks also called them “the fires that surround the North and South edges of the world”.

In central Asia the belief of the Chuvash peoples is that the lights were the god/goddess Suratan-tura (Birth-giving Heaven).

The Algonquin Indian folklore proclaimed that the northern lights were their ancestors dancing around a ceremonial fire.

The Athabascan people who lived in what is now known as Wrangell St. Elias National Park, saw messages from their dead, the “sky dwellers“.

I love this kind of way of seeing the world. It’s beautiful, much more beautiful than ‘the northern lights’. And as beautiful as they are, it seems fitting we should have a beautiful way to refer to them.

Our Northern Lights Photography

We’ve had some pretty great weather here through the month of February, and that means, a great time to get out and look for northern lights. Working on my own project, rather than photo tours, I was able to hit a few destinations I wanted to shoot that are a little more hit and miss; less reliable than some others, but places I wanted to shoot nonetheless.

One of those places is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Inevitably I’d be in the wrong place at the wrong time in a place slightly larger than the country of Switzerland; I’d head off in one direction and then have fog and haze cloud up the skies, or I’d head off in another direction, and the lights display would be directly behind me. The mountains in front me being what I want to shoot, and the lights behind me. Not a great mix.

But, such is what happens when you have specific ideas in mind; it’s important to be flexible in nature photography, and particularly so when shooting the northern lights, but part of working on a project involves fulfilling your own ideas. Spontaneity is great, and I’m all for it. But I’m also interested in trying to make a photo of something I envision ahead of time, and working toward that.

It’s a rewarding, but often frustrating endeavor.